Innovation
Innovation
BBVA Spark has granted €4 million in financing to TaxDown, a fintech specialized in digital taxation in Spain with a presence in Latin America. The operation will accelerate the company’s growth, the development of new AI-based solutions and the expansion of its technological team. This financing benefits from the support of the European Union – NextGenerationEU and the European Investment Fund, with with Spain supporting the program through the InvestEU State compartment.
BBVA Spark will take part for the fourth consecutive year in 4YFN, the leading event for startups, investors and corporates held within the framework of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. The event comes at a key moment for the unit. Since its launch, BBVA Spark has committed close to €1 billion in financing and, in the past year alone, signed more than 30 deals with innovative, high-growth companies across Europe and Latin America.
For years, discussions around artificial intelligence in business have focused on the technology itself: which models to use, which tools to deploy, and which use cases to prioritize. In many organizations, that stage is largely behind us. AI is now part of everyday operations across multiple functions. As a result, the real challenge has shifted.
BBVA has joined a consortium of eleven major European financial institutions that have formed a joint venture, Qivalis, to launch a euro-pegged stablecoin. The aim is to enable faster and cheaper payments, as well as the settlement of digital assets within a regulated environment backed by all the safeguards that a European bank can offer. The commercial launch is slated for the second half of 2026, once the technical and regulatory developments have been completed.
The financing, closed at the end of 2025, aims to support the scaling of Lanes & Planes, the leading provider of digital solutions for mid-market business travel and expense management. The facility will serve to finance the company's growth. This financing partially benefits from the support of the European Union and the European Investment Fund (EIF) under the InvestEU program.
Garanti BBVA has incorporated two new features into its mobile app that let customers plan, reserve and manage their travel in one place. In partnership with Jolly, the bank has added ‘Plan Your Trip’ and ‘Add Trip’ features to the ‘My Travel’ section of its mobile app, with all travel transactions taking place seamlessly and securely on the app.
Garanti BBVA completely reshaped digital banking in 2025. With generative artificial intelligence at the heart of its digital strategy, the bank has evolved the user experience, making it more intuitive, more personalized and smarter. Garanti BBVA Mobile has transformed the banking experience by seamlessly integrating into millions of customers’ daily lives.
In 2025, BBVA successfully completed the global rollout of ADA, its new data and artificial intelligence platform. This technological foundation is key in enabling the bank to offer clients more agile, personalized, and efficient services. Over the course of the year, ADA also received recognition from numerous international organizations operating in the financial and technology sectors.
BBVA’s Turkish unit has introduced a new tool on its Garanti BBVA Mobile app to help customers manage their personal finances, improve their financial health and plan for the future. ‘My Credit Coach’ provides an overview of each customer’s financial situation based on their banking history and offers personalized recommendations.
BBVA has rolled out a roadmap, known as ‘The Eight,’ aimed at ramping up the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to evolve the way the bank interacts with customers, manages risk, automates processes, and strengthens its technological capabilities. This decisive step forward in its transformation will enable the bank to radically improve its range of products and services through innovation and to structurally enhance its ways of working to boost value creation.
Image: Antonio Bravo, Head of Data at BBVA
BBVA’s digital banks in Europe are exploring what could become the first banking app in the world natively integrated within ChatGPT, marking a bold step forward in how financial services integrate with conversational AI. This demonstration shows how people will be able to discover BBVA’s products and services in Italy and Germany through a dedicated BBVA app built directly into OpenAI’s conversational assistant.