Communications

How important is a good serve in women’s tennis? By how many percentage points does a player need to improve her serve to climb a position in the WTA ranking? Does it take a minimum number of cross-court slice backhands to beat a specific rival? The answers to these and other questions that anyone, from fans to tennis players and their coaches, may ask are nothing but the result of measurements that are very easy to take. Current Big Data technology is capable of this and much more and, properly applied, could play a decisive role in winning games, changing training plans, or tactics in real time and contributing to decision making processes.

Discovery Max will premiere the ‘Ice Cream Maker of the Himalaya’. The two stars of the documentary host the official media presentation. Carlos Soria and Jordi Roca meet again after sharing a once-in-a-lifetime experience in the Himalayas.

BBVA has agreed to invest £45m (around €64m) for a 29.5% stake in Atom, the UK’s first mobile-only bank, which will launch in early 2016. The investment is part of BBVA’s strategy to lead financial services in the digital age.

BBVA Chairman & CEO Francisco González participated in the Strategy Research Conference, organized by the Harvard Business School to analyze how large multinationals are changing their strategies to respond to technological change. Besides Francisco González, other top executives from companies such as PepsiCo and Mozilla took to the stand.

For years, IBM has been showcasing the prowess of its ‘technological beasts’ to the world through different applications in the world of sports. In one of the most famous instances of this approach, Deeper Blue, Deep Blue’s successor, managed to defeat Gary Kasparov himself, although the outcome was somewhat controversial. Now, both the men’s (ATP) and women’s (WTA) circuits in the world of tennis have been added to the company’s scope of action.

For the first time, the King and Queen of Spain visited Ciudad BBVA, the Group’s corporate headquarters in Madrid, to unveil a commemorative plaque on the main building, La Vela. The Chairman & CEO of BBVA, Francisco González, thanked King Felipe and Queen Letizia for their visit and explained how BBVA’s new headquarters in Madrid is contributing to the Group’s transformation.

BBVA Wallet, the bank’s mobile payment app, has been downloaded more than 1 million times, less than two years after its launch. Already available in four countries, the app is also being launched this week in Turkey by Garanti Bank - in which BBVA has a nearly 40% stake - under the BonusFlas brand.

BBVA Research maintains its growth forecast for Spain at 3.2% in 2015 and 2.7% in 2016, according to the latest report Spain Economic Outlook presented this Tuesday by Jorge Sicilia, the chief economist of the BBVA Group, and Rafael Doménech, BBVA Research's chief economist for Developed Economies.

BBVA has exited the list of Global Systemically Important Banks, G-SIBs, published today by the Financial Stability Board (FSB). BBVA is predominantly a retail bank, with operations in over 30 countries and with a sound and straightforward business model. The decision is coherent with the nature of BBVA’s business model.

Cooking Up a Tribute, produced by BBVA Contenidos, was subject to tribute at the Spanish embassy in Japan after winning the best documentary award at the Latin Beat Film Festival in Tokyo. The feature film was introduced by Josep Roca, Sommelier at El Celler de Can Roca and the middle brother of the three owners of the world's best restaurant, who was joined by Gonzalo de Benito, Spanish Ambassador to Japan.

BBVA earned €2.82 billion in the first nine months of 2015, up 45.9% in y-o-y terms, without considering the one-off impacts from corporate deals closed so far this year (partial sale of CNCB and sale of CIFH and acquisitions of Catalunya Banc and of a 14.89% stake in Garanti). After factoring in these impacts, net profit totaled €1.7 billion, down 11.8% from a year earlier.

BBVA earned €2.82 billion in the first nine months of 2015, up 45.9% in y-o-y terms, without considering the one-off impacts from corporate deals closed so far this year (partial sale of CNCB and sale of CIFH and acquisitions of Catalunya Banc and of a 14.89% stake in Garanti). After factoring in these impacts, net profit totaled €1.7 billion, down 11.8% from a year earlier.

BBVA COO Carlos Torres Vila spoke this Tuesday at the Innovate, Connect and Transform (ICT) conference held in Lisbon, where he said that the transformation of the financial industry is not only based on digitizing financial services, but also on reshaping the customer's experience.

Cooking Up a Tribute opens today in Spain in the 63rd edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival after its successful worldwide premiere in the last edition of the Berlin Film Festival. Josep Roca, sommelier and maître at El Celler de Can Roca, and the film’s co-directors Luis González and Andrea Gómez present the documentary in Saint Sebastian, a recount of the tour on which the team behind the El Celler de Can Roca restaurant embarked last year – when it was named the world’s best restaurant by the Restaurant magazine – whose itinerary included the United States, Mexico, Colombia and Peru. The screening will close the 5th edition of the ‘Culinary Zinema’ section.

Two London-based fintech start-ups - Everledger, which uses the Blockchain to record ownership of valuables, and Origin Markets, a platform which directly connects corporate bond issuers with institutional investors - have won the 2015 BBVA Open Talent Europe final. OpenTalent, now in its 7th year, seeks to support the fintech ecosystem by finding and supporting the best start-ups across the world, and is part of BBVA’s work to transform its business using digital technology.

The city of Madrid has a new architectural landmark, located in the Las Tablas District, north of the capital. La Vela, an elliptic high-rise as tall as the Statue of Liberty in New York, has reached its maximum height (93 m). The works to fit out the glazing on both sides of the building will start soon.

Startups making their mark in lending took top honors in the regional finals in New York of the BBVA Open Talent 2015 competition, designed by the global bank to nurture the fintech ecosystem and support companies with great ideas.

The winners of BBVA Open Talent Latin America have been announced. Bitnexo was chosen for its blockchain-based payments solution for companies trading with Asia, and Destacame.cl, which has already been recognized with the Special Financial Inclusion Award, won top honors for its system which creates credit risk profiles based on bill payment histories for basic services.

The French, British, Germans, Dutch and Russians are the biggest summer spenders in Spain, according to a study published today by the BBVA Innovation Centre in partnership with BBVA Data & Analytics.

The BBVA-El Celler de Can Roca tour said goodbye to Argentina prior to embarking on the US leg of the tour. Over the course of their one-week stay in Buenos Aires, brothers Joan, Josep and Jordi Roca, owners of the world’s best restaurant, treated over 500 BBVA customers and guests to a specially designed menu, with ingredients and wines hailing from almost all of the country’s regions.

Destacame.cl, a Chilean start-up that allows users to build a credit score based on their history of paying utility bills, has won the BBVA Open Talent 2015 Special Financial Inclusion Award. As part of their award, Destacame.cl will present their product at September’s Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) Global Policy Forum, held in September in Maputo, Mozambique.

Garbiñe Muguruza’s return to competition: The Rogers Cup in Toronto will be the first tournament she plays since her successful Wimbledon campaign this year. The BBVA Ambassador, who will be departing toward Canada today, will arrive in excellent physical shape and in high spirits. Ranked 9th in the WTA Tour, she hopes to make it to the final rounds of the US Open Series tournaments leading up to the last Grand Slam of the Season.

The 2015 BBVA-El Celler de Can Roca Tour will broadcast one of its events in Buenos Aires. The event will be broadcast from the Terrazas Bistró restaurant at La Rural, where the Roca brothers will prepare a menu with typical dishes such as Salta lamb, black hake, mate, cheese and quince, among others. During the dinner, the guests will also sample new takes on traditional dishes such as "alfajores", "choripán" and "chimichurri", accompanied by Argentinian wines selected by Josep Roca.

The new app reflects BBVA's commitment to make things easier for customers. They are free to choose how they want to interact with their bank at any moment in accordance with their personal needs and circumstances.

BBVA chairman stated this morning that “investing in the digital ecosystem is investing in our future.” Francisco González is taking part in the Wired Money 2015 summit, held at the British Museum in London, together with prominent figures of the digital ecosystem who are transforming the financial industry.

Customer experience, mobility and new business models based on leading fintech startups all form part of a process that many financial institutions are carrying out and these are the seven steps that they should follow in order to achieve success.

BBVA Chairman Francisco González today presented a new book called Reinventing the company in the digital era. It contains the thoughts of specialists from different fields of knowledge on how the revolution driven by information technology is transforming the principles we use in our work and business activities. Apart from Francisco González, the participants at the presentation included other co-authors: Philip Evans (Boston Consulting Group), Alison Maitland (London Cass Business School), and Celia de Anca and Salvador Aragón, both from IE Business School.

Today, BBVA presented the Spanish tennis player Garbiñe Muguruza as its new global brand ambassador. The 21-year old is currently ranked 20th by the WTA, the highest spot she’s reached so far, crowning an excellent season in which she defeated the number 1 and 2 ranked players, Serena Williams and Simona Halep, and ended the year strong by participating in the WTA Finals Tournament in the doubles category.

The interest in artificial intelligence seems ultimately to approximate the search for self-aware systems that can act in a "human" way (known as a 'Singularity').

Cooking up a Tribute will take part in the 5th edition of the "Culinary Zinema: Cine and Gastronomy" section of the San Sebastián Festival. The film, produced by BBVA Contenidos, is the audiovisual testimony of the tour that took El Celler de Can Roca to the cities of Houston, Dallas, Mexico City, Monterrey, Bogotá and Lima in the Americas. The documentary also reflects the social commitment of the Roca brothers and their desire always to find the best ingredients in every geographical area and the small local producers who continue to make it possible.

This morning BBVA Chairman Francisco González explained how the bank is ready to cater to the needs of a generation of customers who grew up using the Internet, after completing its new technology platform over the past few years. He said, “In digital banking the really important decisions were taken seven years ago”.

BBVA is taking a significant step in its transformation process by creating the business area of Digital Banking, led by Carlos Torres Vila. The new division’s initial priorities are to accelerate the Group's transformation and boost development of new digital businesses.