BBVA has been investing heavily in what it calls "intelligent sales" using data and AI to effectively target customers through their phones.

The bank has rolled out a Global Data Platform and an AI Factory and has trained up more than 830 data scientists and 140 AI experts. These staffers have helped develop more than 350 user cases to help understand and implement the huge amounts of data at their disposal.

The work appears to have paid off, with BBVA revealing in its third quarter result that digital sales across the group stood at 59%. Measured by economic value, this equates to 45%.

Having built the data analytical capabilities to understand their customers' financial lives, the bank worked to create a "snowball effect", building a series of layers into the way in which products and services are promoted to people.

In Spain, the first stage involved adding rich media imagery to promotion, with products fitted with the customers' general profile. Then, BBVA worked to get rid of bottlenecks, for example making sure that if customers do not finish an application in one session, they do not need to put in the data when they return.

Some Spanish campaigns saw a nine-times increase in digital sales, while personalisation also contributed to rising engagement rates and falling attrition rates.

Rob Brown, global head, digital sales, BBVA, says: "The innovations that have been delivered have always been focused on our desire to give our customers a world-class banking experience, whatever channel they use.

"But we also hoped that the better we could do this, the more relevant, individual and personalised the products and advice we could offer, the more chance we had of customers contracting our services and continuing to bank with us."