Bbva bets its future on ai while war and energy chaos rattle the boardroom
Inside a glass-walled auditorium in Bilbao, the owners of BBVA listened as chairman Carlos Torres Vila declared the bank’s next war chest won’t be measured in euros but in algorithms. “Artificial intelligence is the transforming force of our time,” he told the 2026 shareholder meeting, brushing off the ghost of last year’s failed bid for Sabadell with a single swipe of techno-futurism.
The numbers that silence doubters
CEO Onur Genç followed with a slide deck that looked more like a Silicon Valley roadmap than a staid banking presentation: AI will triangulate customer service, internal processes and employee productivity. No buzzwords, just a blunt promise—127,000 staff will either ride the model or be outrun by it. The bank already claims 11.5 million new clients in 2025, two-thirds onboarded without a single human handshake, pushing the active customer base past 81 million. Profit hit a record €10.5 billion, a 19.3% ROTE that even Goldman envy.
Yet the subtext in the room was anxiety, not triumph. War on Europe’s eastern flank, energy prices still twitching every time a pipeline coughs, and Sam Altman warning that super-intelligence could arrive by 2028 “forcing a rewrite of global governance.” BBVA’s answer? Get there first. Torres name-checked the lender’s early digital pivot as proof it can sprint ahead of regulators rather than chase them.
Tokens, pipes and the race against time
While other banks flirt with tokenized deposits and DeFi experiments, BBVA’s brass framed AI as the umbrella that shelters every other bet. Tokenization? Feed it through machine-learning risk engines. Instant payments? Let the model spot fraud before the money moves. Decentralized finance? Only if the algorithm can price the counter-party in milliseconds. The mantra is simple: automate first, scale second, apologize never.
Genç admitted the timeline is hazy—“still too early to know exactly how things change”—but the cadence of his voice carried the certainty of a man who has already green-lit the budget. Staff were told to expect “rapid and profound” change, corporate speak for: learn Python or polish your résumé.
By the time the gavel closed the session, shareholder questions about dividend policy felt antique. The only figure that mattered was the €10.5 billion war chest, ready to be weaponized in a world where silicon, not steel, will decide the next winners of finance. BBVA has chosen its side; the algorithm is already trading while the rest of us are still typing passwords.