How BBVA, DBS, and BNY are leveraging AI to transform global financial services.
The institutions leading the banking industry today are reimagining how technology, data, artificial intelligence, and digital assets can transform every aspect of financial services.
From deploying AI agents that augment employees and personalize customer experiences to building cloud-native data platforms and pioneering tokenized financial products, these banks are reshaping the future of finance. Their investments are delivering measurable gains in efficiency, productivity, and client engagement while creating new business opportunities.
The following three firms are among the world’s most innovative banks, setting new standards for an industry no longer defined solely by mobile apps or digital payments.
BBVA
BBVA, is a pioneer in industrializing AI, is transitioning to a sophisticated multiagent ecosystem. Key achievements last year included the global rollout of ADA (analytics, data, and AI), a unified data and AI platform, and the adoption of Gen AI through a global agreement with OpenAI, deploying ChatGPT Enterprise to 120,000 employees. These initiatives led to significant internal time savings and the launch of an AI-driven banking app in Spain featuring a financial coach.
“At BBVA, we use AI to make every interaction faster, smarter, and more personalized, while our people focus where empathy and judgment matter most: complex financial decisions,” states Antonio Bravo, global head of data at BBVA. “This is not a choice between AI and human advice, but a model that combines AI with human expertise, so clients get scale, trust, and the right support at the right moment.”
For 2026 and beyond, BBVA aims to capitalize on these foundations—evolving from a bank that uses AI to an AI-driven organization. This involves deploying six specialized “robotic” agents for high-impact tasks and implementing the “alter ego” concept, which empowers every employee to build their own personalized “second-self” proactive agent. This deployment balances innovation with responsibility, ensuring that advances are matched with robust governance, security, and regulatory alignment. BBVA is banking on AI to maintain a superior efficiency ratio relative to its European peers.
BNY
BNY has made significant investments in both its technology and its workforce. The bank developed a secure cloud platform to unify investment and accounting data, allowing for seamless integration with client systems and large-scale processing. Its Data & Analytics (D&A) platform incorporates built-in AI for data tagging and document extraction, minimizing errors. BNY has also boosted employee engagement by investing in staff training and recognition.
D&A was developed in direct response to industry challenges, such as scattered data. Jay Hinton, global head of product, D&A, at BNY, highlights the problem: “Many organizations still rely on scattered, inefficient processes (like file transfers), which makes it difficult to understand the reasoning, context, and assumptions underpinning data and decisions. Having the system of record, the golden source of truth, makes us better able to do so.”
Modernization efforts are advancing operations and creating new commercial opportunities by building a secure, multicloud, application programming interface (API)-first, cloud-native data platform with scalable processing. Standardized data products and an integrated ecosystem ensure interoperability. Agile delivery with continuous client feedback guarantees product alignment. Clients are using new AI features, such as auto-classification and intelligent document processing, that adhere to enterprise AI governance standards for safe use, maintain data lineage and control, and thereby increase client confidence and reduce operational risk.
DBS Bank
In 2025, DBS Bank significantly outpaced regional competitors by transitioning to “AI industrialization,” generating S$1 billion (about $778.6 million) in “economic value” from AI and tokenization initiatives. The bank deployed over 2,000 AI models, launched Gen AI tools like the customer-facing chatbot DBS Joy and the internal iCoach for workforce coaching, and began reporting economic value rather than just efficiency gains.
“At DBS, we don’t look at human‑AI synergy purely through time saved. The real measure is whether AI frees up our people from low‑value toil so they can focus on higher‑value work—better judgment, deeper advisory conversations, and more thoughtful decisions. That lift in quality is as important to us as efficiency,” said Nimish Panchmatia, chief data and transformation officer.
DBS has also pioneered institutional digital assets, launching tokenized structured notes and establishing the first bank-backed trust capable of holding digital assets. Furthermore, the bank has strengthened its ecosystem dominance through strategic partnerships with Ant International and Tencent, giving DBS PayLah! users access to over 150 million merchants globally.
Moving forward, DBS is positioning itself as a technology firm with a banking license, leveraging a leaner cost-to-income ratio and a shift toward agentic AI—models with independent decision-making—to maintain its competitive edge and penetrate the high-margin institutional decentralized finance (DeFi) field.
