Álvaro Martín (BBVA): “AI is changing the way we work and serve our customers”
The use of ChatGPT Enterprise is already saving BBVA employees an average of two hours of work per week. In tandem, the bank has been busy preparing new agents, built on artificial intelligence (AI), to help its managers provide better service to business customers. These were some of the examples cited by Álvaro Martín, head of Data for Business Clients and Sustainability at BBVA, at the Mobile World Congress, in showing that AI will entail a new transformation process spanning the entire Group. Meanwhile, Ignacio de Loyola Gil, head of the Digital Banking Business in Europe, explained BBVA’s strategy to reach new European markets thanks to the scalability of the digital platform developed in Spain.
Anticipating technological changes that respond to customer needs has been a key part of BBVA’s digital transformation right from the outset, according to Álvaro Martín during his talk at the MWC. He explained how the bank, when embarking on its transformation, had anticipated what lay ahead by astutely picking out the cell phone as a priority channel for improving customer relations. “Capturing the opportunities offered by new technologies runs in BBVA’s DNA. We know full well that technology is not just a tool, but also a change in the way we work and how we serve our customers,” proclaimed Martín. It is this philosophy that has guided the bank in fitting out its digital channels with AI capabilities. “AI marks the natural evolution of digitalized financial services,” he explained.
Traditional AI technologies (such as machine learning or neural networks) have enabled BBVA to offer its customers tools that help them manage their finances in a personalized way. Users who rely on these tools have succeeded in growing their bank balances by an average of 11% in Spain and up to 20% in Mexico, he remarked, which has a significant impact on their financial health. Moreover, BBVA’s mobile banking has evolved to offer an even more seamless experience, with smart notifications and features designed to make money management more intuitive and convenient.
With the increasingly widespread use of language models, BBVA is exploring viable use cases for this technology when it comes to financial services. One outcome of this exploratory work is the evolution of its virtual assistant Blue to feature generative AI. Its new conversational capabilities allow customers to interact with Blue using natural language, receive personalized information about their finances delivered with empathy, and carry out certain account and card-related transactions. The new model has been launched with more than 150 queries and transactions and is able to answer upward of 3,000 questions posed by users.
BBVA is also working to introduce AI-based support for its managers of retail customers and businesses. In the first phase, customers will have intuitive and agile access to the bank’s catalog of products, services and banking transactions, allowing them to resolve their queries and manage their finances. Looking ahead, AI will complement the work of the teams to gain a better understanding of customer needs and support them in their projects with bespoke solutions.
BBVA's head of Data for Business Clients and Sustainability remarked that the transformation with generative AI is not limited to the relationship with customers, but also to internal processes and ways of working. In 2024, the bank was one of the first European financial institutions to sign an agreement with OpenAI to hand out ChatGPT Enterprise licenses among its employees. Currently, more than 3,300 people across the bank use one of these licenses and 85 percent of them use the license on a regular basis. Eighty percent claim to have saved at least two hours of work a week by using the tool, allowing them to focus more on quality and creativity when going about their work.
BBVA has identified more than 1,500 ChatGPT use cases relevant to the organization, of which around a thousand have scalability potential, thus consolidating the role of language models in business optimization.
The bank has set up a Global AI Adoption area to enable easier access to these tools among employees, with the aim of boosting their productivity and creativity. This area synergizes with the digital strategy being headed up by the Data area, which also includes its own AI Factory with which it develops its products and services based on AI.
European expansion
Ignacio de Loyola Gil, head of the digital banking business in Europe, explained the keys to BBVA’s digital banking growth strategy, which leans on the bank’s technological infrastructure in Spain to grow in new European markets. “We have a scalable and differential platform enabling rapid implementation with greater efficiency, guaranteeing our customers a personalized experience and a 24/7 service at no cost,” assured Gil.
Ignacio de Loyola Gil, head of the digital banking business in Europe
This model has been a great success in Italy, where BBVA has climbed past 600,000 customers, achieving high levels of satisfaction in the process, with a 4.8 rating on the main download platforms. Fresh from its success in Italy, the bank is preparing for its next challenge: entering the German market in 2025.
BBVA is committed to a simple digital proposition so that customers can enjoy all the usual services free of charge, while also being able to arrange payment, financing, savings and investment products under competitive terms and conditions. This is a further show of BBVA’s commitment to innovation and growth in the European market.