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Innovation

Innovation

BBVA has surpassed one million customers in Italy as it marks five years since entering the country's retail banking market. This milestone confirms the strong reception of its 100% digital banking model, where the key goal is to become the primary bank for Italian customers, as BBVA Chair Carlos Torres Vila highlighted during his visit to celebrate the anniversary. BBVA is reaffirming its long-term commitment to the Italian market, where it also has a significant Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) business, supporting Italian companies in their growth and international expansion plans.

In the photo: Walter Rizzi, Head of Digital Banking at BBVA Italy; Carlos Torres, Chair of BBVA; Alberto Maroni, Head of BBVA CIB Italy; and Murat Kalkan, Global Head of Digital Banks at BBVA, yesterday during the BBVA Chair’s visit to Italy.

BBVA has announced plans to work with NVIDIA to explore the potential of the OpenShell Reference Architecture, unveiled by NVIDIA at its GTC Berlin conference, to enable new approaches to AI agent safety, security and governance. The collaboration is part of the bank’s strategy to scale the use of AI agents across the organization while maintaining oversight and control.

BBVA has presented the evolution of its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy at an event with analysts and investors, introducing ‘The Frame’, a new common framework for creating, deploying, managing and governing AI agents at scale. After focusing its efforts over the past year on developing specific use cases, the bank is now advancing this standard to extend the technology across the organisation and move forward with its transformation. Carlos Torres Vila, Chair of BBVA, explained that this capability will be critical to delivering more proactive and personalised banking, always for the benefit of customers.

BBVA CEO Onur Genç said in London on Tuesday that artificial intelligence (AI) will drive the next major transformation of the sector and that the bank is very well positioned to address this new cycle. The Group was a pioneer in the digitalization era and is taking the same approach to AI: early adoption, rapid scaling and a transformation around this new technology. “We do believe we are embracing this technology better than our competitors,” he said during his participation in the CEO conference organized by Bank of America.

BBVA has provided BizAway with €10 million in financing to support its acquisition of Dutch company Uniglobe Alliance Travel. The transaction will enable the scaleup to bolster its presence in Northern Europe, expand its customer base in the Benelux region, and move forward with its goal of becoming the leading corporate travel partner across the continent. The financing benefits from the support of the European Union and the European Investment Fund (EIF) under the InvestEU program.

Two generative AI assistants developed by the teams managing BBVA’s contact centres in Italy and Germany—the Group’s two fully digital banks—have reduced the average handling time for the most common customer enquiries about products, services and general procedures by more than 15%. By speeding up information retrieval and response preparation, these AI copilots enable customer service agents to resolve routine enquiries more quickly and dedicate more time to more complex cases that require deeper analysis and personalised support.