B.E.L.A. (Behavioral Economics Learning Algorithm) Qorus Banking Innovation Awards 2022 - Winner

The Behavioral Economics Department within BBVA was born in 2017. We were a few specialists with a new way of looking at things and a great challenge from our CEO (now president) Carlos Torres: embed behavioral economics in all BBVA does. An example of what we used to do in order to help the local business line was to apply the scientific method and use different biases represented on ad copy to improve ads performance. We used to do this “by hand”. Not only the copy and ads definition but also what we call a pre-testing that in many cases we used to do with external providers making surveys on the street (normally with mockups of the ads presented on ipads to the subjects). From those examples of true value generation from our discipline, petitions for our help skyrocketed. But we were still lacking human resources and influence in such a big organization. We were frustrated knowing that our methodology worked so well but we could not apply it at a higher scale. And then the BELA idea came up naturally: Why don't we industrialize our methodology with the help of AI and advanced analytics? We made virtue out of necessity... And BELA was born!