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CaixaBank launches its app inside ChatGPT, the first from a bank in Spain
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
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CaixaBank now offers its own app inside ChatGPT, which anyone, whether or not they bank with it, can use to learn about its offering and compare options. BBVA opened its own in February for Italy and Germany, but CaixaBank is the first Spanish lender to take the step in its home country. The bank pledges not to hand over data on the people who use it and keeps sign-ups for itself, outside the assistant.
CaixaBank has launched its own app inside ChatGPT, OpenAI's conversational assistant, according to Expansión. Any individual, whether or not they are a customer of the bank, can install it from the platform's app catalog and use it to look up information on the products the bank offers and to compare alternatives.
According to the newspaper, CaixaBank is the first Spanish bank to do this in its home market, and financial sources quoted by Expansión say other lenders are considering the same move. In February, BBVA launched its app in ChatGPT for Germany and Italy, the two countries where it is building its digital banking business. According to BBVA, its app handles informational queries about accounts, cards and savings products, and it is only available in German and Italian to people who open ChatGPT from those two countries.
Until now, if someone asked ChatGPT about a specific product, such as a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, the assistant could already show part of CaixaBank's offering, but it pieced it together from data taken from other websites and did not necessarily know which options were current at the time. With the integration, the bank has a channel of its own in ChatGPT where it controls the information it provides. The bank makes clear that user data will not be handed over and that signing up will stay in its hands, even though its products can be explored from the assistant.
The launch is part of CaixaBank's AI strategy. In April, the bank extended the use of its agents to sign-ups for its whole range of products on its website and app, and went on to handle an average of 6,000 conversations a month, according to Expansión.
The newspaper places the move in the first phase of so-called agentic commerce, in which AI agents search for information, compare catalogs and help people choose. The second, which Expansión describes as far more demanding, would be for them to sign up for products or make payments on their own, and opening up catalogs is not enough by itself to get there. According to market sources quoted by the paper, banks are weighing, among other options, having the outside assistant talk to each bank's own AI agent, so that sensitive operations stay under their control. Spain's main banks have spent about a year studying whether to open their catalogs to third-party AI assistants, the paper adds.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
AI assistants are becoming one more shop window, and banks are starting to decide how they want to appear in them. Until now, what ChatGPT said about a bank depended on what it found on other pages; with an app of its own, the bank decides what information is shown. The line CaixaBank draws is clear: the assistant guides and compares, but sign-ups and data stay in house. That split will probably hold for a while, because letting an agent sign up or pay on its own raises challenges nobody has solved yet. Any company selling products that people compare can take a lesson from this: if it does not give assistants its own information, they will rebuild it from whatever they find elsewhere.
Source: Expansión · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
