Global Finance recognizes BBVA for its data strategy, AI and empathetic customer service
The international publication presented two awards to ADA, BBVA’s global data platform, a pioneer in the financial sector, and to a process that applies behavioral economic techniques to telephone debt negotiation using an empathetic approach with the customer. In addition, its AI Factor was once again recognized as one of the best financial innovation laboratories in the world.
The ADA platform (name for the combination of Analytics + Data + AI, in honor of the pioneering consumer scientist Ada Lovelace) represents a major milestone in the bank’s digital transformation, as it consolidates all of the Group’s data management in a single global infrastructure. This innovation, which is pioneering in the financial sector and was recognized with a Global Finance ‘The Innovators’ award, has made it possible to replace a limited, fragmented local system with a scalable, efficient solution based on Amazon Web cloud services.
With ADA, BBVA manages four petabytes of data and 40,000 databases per day, thus significantly improving the accessibility, agility and security of information management. Thanks to the scalability and processing capability of the cloud, the availability time of end users’ analytical work environments on the platform has declined 94 percent. Furthermore, ADA allows BBVA to dynamically scale resources to adapt to the demand at each point, optimizing costs and performance.
In 2024, BBVA migrated data from Spain, Uruguay, central services, corporate banking and (CIB)--a complex task that involved the migration of tens of thousands of processes and thousands of users with no service interruptions. The Group expects to finish integration data from Latin America in 2025.
“This recognition underscores BBVA’s strategic commitment to a global data platform on a public cloud, built on advanced AWS technology,” explained Federico Esteban, Global Head of Data Architecture at BBVA. “ADA allows us to efficiently process both structured and unstructured data, support real-time artificial intelligence capabilities and provide centralized data management for all countries. This evolution reinforces our ability to innovate, scale and respond with agility to business needs in an increasingly more digital, demanding environment.”
Empathy for debt management
Global Finance also recognized BBVA Mexico for using behavioral economics techniques to make telephone negotiation of credit card delinquencies more empathetic.
The Behavioral Economics unit found that customers tend to perceive debt as a stressful factor and a loss of control, a psychological process that consists of four stages: attention, perception, decision and action. The team created a negotiation guide for agents based on behavioral principles to help them approach these psychological stages with greater empathy and understanding during phone conversations with customers to discuss debt repayment.
This customer-based approach prioritizes addressing customers’ emotional needs and helps them get their finances back under control with less emotional stress. Furthermore, by intervening in the early stages of delinquency, the goal is to prevent the debt from becoming unmanageable. The initiative has significantly increased the amount of debt recovered.
“One of our lines of work focuses on identifying and acting on behavioral elements that lead to negative experiences, and reversing a situation of a missed payment is a complex moment,” explained Nuria Pesquera, Global Head of Behavioral Economics at BBVA. “Not paying a debt produces a feeling of loss of control over our finances, causes stress, and negatively impacts our self-esteem. In this project, we adjusted the conversations of our phone operators in Mexico by structuring the payment message around the concept of ‘relief’. This had a major impact on recovery, and customers feel supported and understood–so much so that what began as a phone-based pilot in one country has been taken to other channels and countries.”
Where AI disruption is forged
Global Finance also recognized BBVA’s AI Factory as one of the best financial innovation labs in the world for the fourth time. The Group created AI Factory in 2019 to take AI-based solutions to the next level, addressing some of the most complex challenges in the financial sector. The factory investigates the latest global trends in AI and develops analytical components that power technology solutions, such as the financial health features on the BBVA app, and personalized recommendations for financial products.
In 2024, the AI Factory expanded to Mexico and Turkey–the Group regions with the highest volume of customers and business along with Spain–with the aim of implementing their data products across the globe and promoting the transformation of the bank’s internal processes using artificial intelligence. AI Factory has over 400 professionals worldwide, including data scientists, machine learning engineers, data architects and digital product experts.
Code reuse is one of the pillars on which its developments are based, as it allows for shorter product development times, and faster delivery to customers in all countries where the bank operates. The analytical components are centralized in the Mercury library, part of which is open and shared with the open source community through the collaborative platform Github to contribute to innovation in the fintech ecosystem.
“Financial innovation laboratories play a fundamental role in promoting the current digital revolution by shortening the distance between theoretical concepts and practical applications,” said Joseph Giarraputo, Publisher and Editorial Director at Global Finance.