BBVA stands ready for generative AI

Jon Ander Beracoechea, Global Head of Advanced Analytics at BBVA, and Curro Maturana, Global Head of GenAI at the bank, presented some of these projects during the third DataFest, the three-day in-house event held in Mexico, Peru and Spain where BBVA seeks to build synergies among its data scientists. This year the fest also extended to engineers and specialists, thus broadening the event's audience to nearly 5,000 data professionals from around the world.

Both executives agreed we are witnessing "a time of exponential growth in technology." Speaking from Mexico, Maturana pointed out that AI is "the most global technology we have seen so far. Therefore, all the country units can work on many projects at the same time. We aim to have delocalized ideation and coordinated execution."

The bank is implementing generative AI-led projects in partnership with external providers. By the end of 2024, BBVA expects to have several use cases in place. BBVA is thus preparing to address the use of generative AI technologies, which it expects to have a more immediate impact than expected on the organization's processes--making them more efficient--as well on the roles and functions of employees. Any initiative explored will adhere to the bank's highest standards of legal certainty, technological security and regulatory compliance.

"All forecasts have fallen short," noted Jon Ander Beracoechea at the DataFest held in Madrid. "Where we thought developments would come incrementally over the next few decades, generative technology has greatly sped up the whole process.” In addition, Beracoechea encouraged BBVA developers to not only look for use cases to which generative artificial intelligence can be applied today, but also to try to imagine how it could revolutionize the functions and processes of the future. "We are in the middle of a once-in-a-decade revolution," he pointed out. "Don't just think about banking services as they are today, but also about what they could become.”

In fact, to encourage its professionals' curiosity and detect in-house talent, BBVA launched a DataRally. This in-house gamified competition poses a series of challenges related to the world of finance, customer service and risk management, which employees are asked to solve using generative AI.

DataFest, a meeting point for technological knowledge

This third DataFest also featured several prominent guests and AI world leaders. In Mexico, Omar Sanseviero, Machine Learning Lead Engineer at Hugging Face, explained how to develop and bring machine learning algorithms into production in an open and collaborative way. Hugging Face is a startup that has created a platform for open-source development of artificial intelligence. It has received funding from technology giants such as Google, Amazon, Nvidia and IBM. The company is currently valued at $4.5 billion and is one of the leading players in the AI development field.

In Spain, the guest speaker was Carlos Santana, one of the main popularizers of artificial intelligence in Spanish, especially through his YouTube channel dot CSV, which has more than 800,000 subscribers. Santana shared his thoughts on how the latest developments in artificial intelligence and deep learning could transform society in the near future.

In Peru, Christian Ramirez, from AWS Chile, and Simon Cordova, from AWS Peru, talked about how to perform a large-scale migration of data to the cloud. In addition, they delved into the company's 'low code / no code' services, offering customers apps that do not require programming and thus enabling them to expedite their business decision-making.

Activities at DataFest were capped off with technical workshops and awards for outstanding career development within BBVA. As in previous years, the event was warmly received. At some points during the conference, the combined audience of on-site attendees and online logins added up to more than 900 people.