The technology has already been trialled by at BBVA's call centre in Mexico to address customer complaints and enquiries. Now it will be extended to other markets and areas, as the bank seeks to digitise sales, advisory and support services.

Amelia is capable of detecting and adapting to caller’s emotions, as well as making decisions in real time, and can even suggest improvements to the processes for which 'she' has been trained.

Javier Díaz, CEO, IPsoft for Spain and Latin America, says: “Amelia is the result of 20 years of research during which we have tried to emulate the way the human brain works.

"We are confident that Amelia will help BBVA achieve new milestones in their digital transformation journey and will help improve the experience of the customers of one of the world’s leading financial institutions."

In a separate development, the Spanish bank is exploring the use of a token-based economic model to encourage knowledge sgaring and continuous learning among its employees.

The bank has trialed the BBVA Campus Wallet with 4000 staff, initially assigning each employee a certain number of tokens - that do not have any monetary value - and that can be used to take courses. At the same time, new tokens can be obtained when an employee gives online courses or training to his or her colleagues in an area of his/her expertise.

The tokenomics model on which BBVA Campus Wallet is based involved designing a system to manage supply and demand in such a way as to keep a sufficient number of tokens in circulation so that training would reach all of BBVA’s teams, but without saturating the “market” with excess tokens that would then undermine the value of the training.

“We are not only learning at a technological level, we are developing a decentralized access-to-training model that involves the design of a new open system based on these tokens,” says BBVA’s head of training Pilar Concejo.

He says the next step of this project is to take the leap into the Ethereum network, so that all token exchanges will be publicly registered and the tokenomics defined in smart contracts.