Luz Fernández Espinosa

After six months of testing with a selected group of users, BBVA Switzerland makes its first crypto-asset trading and custody service available to all its private banking clients.

BBVA strengthens its offering for multinational companies with BBVA Pivot. Behind the renewal of its global treasury services lies a strategy to conquer a space that still offers great potential for growth. "We want to double the number of corporate clients that have implemented and operate with BBVA Pivot," says Javier Balbin, Global Head of Enterprise Solutions at BBVA.

BBVA and Ant Group (Alibaba affiliate) have signed an agreement to collaborate on the integration of financial services in their platform, Trusple. Based on blockchain technology, this network is aimed to accelerate the digital transformation and facilitate the financing of international trade operations, with a special focus on small and mid-sized businesses.

34 years old man with a college degree and a master’s. He has spent time working as an employee yet always wanted to create his own business - and he has established more than one startup. This is the profile of a Spanish entrepreneur described in the new study by South Summit, which will hold its next event on October 2nd - October 4th, with BBVA’s support.

Many organizations now process huge amounts of data using artificial intelligence. So it is crucial to find ways to prevent unfair biases. New research by BBVA and the Universidad de Barcelona (UB) tries to achieve this with a model that automatically sorts more than 600 superheroes as “good” or “evil” while disregarding traits like gender or race.

AI Factory is the global development center where BBVA builds the artificial intelligence capabilities that power both its customer solutions – for both the retail and corporate segments – and the Group’s streamlined internal processes. The new structure brings together, under the same roof, a cross-disciplinary team consisting of data scientists, teams from the Engineering area, and representatives from other business areas.

BBVA held its first Family Cybersecurity Day, an initiative aimed at raising awareness and educating employees and their families about the potential risks derived from the online activities and certain digital habits that are already a part of our daily lives.

BBVA Group Executive Chairman Carlos Torres Vila was responsible for welcoming participants to the 87th edition of the Endeavor’s ‘International Selection Panel', which is currently taking place in Madrid. Entrepreneurs have a really important role:  they can drive the society creating wealth and jobs, increasing competitiveness and fostering better use of resources," said Torres Vila.

Ricardo Forcano, BBVA’s Global Head of Engineering and Organization, participated in the Association for the Advancement of Management’s (APD in Spanish) session on Agile Organizations, where he presented how BBVA is transforming its organization and work methods. “It’s a constant learning process,” Forcano said, referring to BBVA’s efforts to incorporate  the agile methodology across all of its central areas. As a result, the bank is able to provide its customers new solutions more effectively.

BBVA is one of the founding members of the International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA), which was officially launched today in Brussels.  Carlos Kuchkovsky, CTO of New Digital Businesses at BBVA, represents the only Spanish company on the new association’s ten-member Board.

NASA's Space Apps Challenge, one of the world’s most popular hackathons, has, once again, awarded a group of Spaniards, in this case the time behind ‘Galaxy Quest.’ The project helps processing real data collected by the Hubble telescope through a 'gamification' process.  But not only that:  It is the first step in developing an artificial neural network using these data, and a new communications channel between NASA and users.  José Luis Martín-Oar, service designer at BBVA and one of the team’s members, tells us everything about the project.

Every parent has been in this position: the baby cries and cries, and we don’t know why. Is it hungry? Is it tired? Ana Laguna, data scientist at BBVA Data & Analytics, asked herself the same questions when her first child was born. Ana looked for an app that would help her understand why her baby was crying.  But she didn’t have any luck. Then she thought she could translate her baby’s crying and understand what it needed any time by using the artificial intelligence techniques that she uses everyday at work.

Creating global products is one of the keys to BBVA’s transformation and represents one of its main challenges to becoming a digital company. The goal is to develop solutions that incorporate the Group’s best practices and whose components can be reused. In doing so, the bank is more efficient, can go to market more quickly, and creates a single user experience across the bank’s operating countries.

BBVA’s commitment to technology has translated into an increase in the number of digital customers, which now represent more than 50% of the bank’s total customers, as well as climbing digital sales, now comprising 41% of all sales. But this digital journey means much more. Digitization has also contributed to greater customer satisfaction and a diminishing drop-out rate - 47% lower among digital customers.

Google recently obtained a payment license in Ireland and Lithuania in order to offer payment services. Alipay, the financial division of Alibaba, received a similar license in Luxembourg. Facebook has had one since 2017. These licenses open the door to Internet giants operating as payment service providers across Europe, allowing them to manage card payments and transfers, for example. Is this merely the first step to them becoming banks?

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a neurologic condition that causes people suffering from it to be dominated by anxiety and develop unwanted thoughts that they cannot get rid of. Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III are applying artificial intelligence techniques to detect which brain areas are affected by this disorder. Emilio Parrado, a data scientist at BBVA was one of the researchers that took part in the project and explains how machine learning can bring huge improvements to any activity, including finance.

BBVA created the Global Head of Data position in March 2017 as part of its strategy to make decisions based on data. David Puente took on this new role, leading one of the most disruptive and essential projects in the bank’s transformation.

If December is the month with the highest sales for traditional shopping, for the last two years November has become the star of Internet shopping. The recent phenomenon of Black Friday brings forward by one month the arrival of Christmas to online shopping, according to a study by BBVA Data & Analytics and BBVA Research.

Boundaries between sectors are quickly disappearing in the fintech world - a trend also apparent in efforts to innovate. With this in mind, the second edition of Open Summit is exploring different ways in which startups and corporations can work together. “At BBVA we want to turn the magic of startups into products that reach our customers,” Derek White, the head of Client Solutions, said at the opening session of the event.

Luisa Gómez Bravo, Global Head of Investment & Cost Management BBVA Group.

Luisa joined BBVA almost 20 years ago. During this time, she has held various positions in the bank, moving up to become the main financial head overseeing the Group’s investments and spending and, specifically the ‘Single Development Agenda’  (SDA).

She studied at ICADE and graduated with degrees in law and business administration. She lived in London for several years where she worked for American investment banks. Her view of BBVA is that it has always given her the opportunity to learn and develop. “That's my main motivation.” she states.

Passionate about her job, she gets excited when she talks about the new way of working – using agile methodologies in small, multidisciplinary teams with quarterly product deliveries that enable fast results. “It's exciting because your effort becomes tangible” she remarks when interviewed about the implications of the new management approach, which prioritizes resources on a global level according to the impact each project could have on BBVA's business.

Three and a half years ago when BBVA acquired Madiva, a small company dedicated to big data, no one could have imagined the impact it would have on the group. In that time, the 16-employee strong startup has shown how the use of non-financial data can translate into new business, sales, and customers.

BBVA realized a few years ago that it wouldn’t be able to tackle its strategic transformation alone, and decided to establish a series of strategic partnerships with a number of industry leaders.

Spain is the team that controls midfield, Russia attacks the most, while Brazil surprisingly is the most defensive. According to big data, such are the styles of play of the soccer teams currently facing off in the hopes of winning the tournament.

Consensus, the Coindesk conference held a week ago in New York, once again showed expectations generated by blockchain and cryptoassets are at their height. More than 8,400 professionals and investors attended the event, which last year had 2,200 visitors.

Kai-Fu Lee, founder of the venture capital fund, Sinovation Ventures, is as popular in China as Elon Musk is in the west. With 50 million followers on “China's Twitter,” the social network, Weibo, he was dubbed by Wired as the indisputable rock star of China’s technology scene.

What happens when an artificial intelligence system recommends a movie or a restaurant? Or a financial product?  To what extent can an algorithm get to know people? These and many more questions were raised during the presentation of the BBVA’s Data and Analytics project ‘RecSys, a recommendation in the era of machine learning’, which brought together experts from diverse fields (cinema, design, law and gastronomy) to discuss how society is changing with the arrival of these technologies.

What happens when you choose a restaurant on the Internet? Or when you want to buy a book? Or find a song? Or get hooked on a new series?  BBVA Data & Analytics in a new item for dissemination explains how the different recommendation systems used by Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify work and how they will extend beyond the consumer and entertainment sectors.

The year 2018 looks to be a crucial one for the entire blockchain ecosystem and distributed ledger technologies (DLT). Beyond the speculative rage that cryptocurrencies have ignited, this year is expected to bring a certain maturity to the market. Here are seven predictions from three BBVA experts regarding the challenges of the new decentralized economy, featured in the specialized news website Criptonoticias.

BBVA has been recognized as one of the corporations doing the most to support startups in Europe. Startup Europe Partnership (SEP), an initiative established by the European Commission to support new companies in the technology field, praised BBVA’s open innovation strategy and included the bank in its ranking of the top “12 Corporate Startup Stars."

BBVA, in collaboration with Wave, conducted the first pilot that uses blockchain to automate the electronic submission of documents in an import-export transaction between Europe and Latin America.  Thanks to Wave’s solution, which uses Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and blockchain, BBVA was able to reduce the time required to send, verify and authorize an international trade transaction, which normally takes from seven to ten days, to just 2.5 hours.

Big Data Spain brought together more than 1,200 specialists in data analysis and science in Madrid for two days, during which it was made clear how this technology can bring a new dimension to any area: from marketing to user experience to economic and geopolitical analysis.

Four years ago, BBVA took on the challenge of turning professional technical profiles into data scientists, launching the first edition of 'From Data Mining to Data Science'. Since then, more than a hundred employees have completed this training program that aims to build up in-house knowledge in new tools and techniques that will allow the bank to deliver on its goal to become a data-based corporation.

BBVA is kickstarting the launch of it open banking program by making eight of its APIs commercially available for the first time.

Nearly 200 BBVA employees, from both global and local teams, met on March 21st in Madrid for the Second Global Quarterly Planning Session. The goal of the event was to expedite the execution of the products and services the bank is developing, converting them into customer experiences. Global Executive Chairman Francisco González participated in the session, indicating that “BBVA has a unique opportunity to be one of the big ‘players" in the global financial system.

Wanted: entrepreneurs, CEOs, mathematicians, scientists. The fintech world needs more female talent. This is the irrefutable conclusion of the many different studies on the subject. Experts say it isn’t simply a question of numbers. There are also much more profound factors that could benefit industries such as the fintech sector. Given their influence in the global economy, women can help develop specific products and solutions for needs that have not yet been identified, or sufficiently explored.

BBVA became a founding member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) today. This new international initiative seeks to share best practices and create standards and reference architectures based on the Ethereum platform, taking advantage of the benefits blockchain technology can offer the corporate world.

BBVA’s bank in Turkey, Garanti Bank, has developed an interface that lets customers perform transactions on their app by speaking to it. Efma recognized Garanti’s mobile voice assistant MIA, naming it the innovation of the month.

The UN has declared February 11th the International Day of Women and Girls in Science to promote female scientists and engage women in engineering, research, mathematics and technology. In celebration of this day, BBVA explains its passion for numbers in hopes of inspiring new generations.

BBVA leads the ranking of the 11 banks and fintech firms developing the best open platform strategy, according to 11FS. The fintech consulting firm notes that BBVA “has taken the bull by the horn” by making a wide range of APIs available to developers through the BBVA API Market.

Of the 1,586 craters in the Moon named after scientists, only 28 of them have been named after a woman. A revealing figure to kick off the Women in Data Science (WiDS) event in Madrid, organized by Stanford University to promote women’s work in a new field that is disrupting industries across the world.

The UN held its first World Data Forum in Cape Town to explore how data analysis and statistics can be used to help attain the Sustainable Development Goals. BBVA Data & Analytics participated in the forum, where it presented several data initiatives for the common good.

Blockchain technology is presented as a veritable revolution, which is going to have an impact comparable to the Internet. Alicia Pertusa, head of Digital Transformation in Investment Banking for BBVA and Carlos Kuchkovsky, CTO of New Digital Business for BBVA, discuss in this conversation the point at which this technology is at, its advantages and the barriers that still have to be overcome.

The banking business is reinventing itself. The impact of fintech companies, technological maturity, and customers who are used to digital experiences, all mark a transformation that the financial industry is facing in the certain knowledge that innovation and collaboration with new players will play an important role in the future. But what are the most difficult barriers to overcome in this process? For BBVA Research, Santander, Banorte and Tecnocom, all present in the panel on The digitization of commercial banking at the Latibex Forum, the response is clear: the challenges are regulation and the change in corporate culture.

The newspaper Expansión has given prominence to BBVA's open innovation strategy in the second edition of the awards for the "50 best digital ideas". The intention of these awards is to recognize the efforts of Spanish companies and institutions to adapt their processes and services to the new digital economy.

Smart contracts have been an impossible dream since the 1990s, but now blockchain technology has breathed new life into this concept aimed at automating contractual relations between people or machines without the involvement of a trusted intermediary.

Atom Bank has been recognized as one of the most innovative startups in the 2016 Fintech 100 ranking. BBVA has a 29.5% stake in the mobile-only bank operating in the U.K.

Anthony Thomson, founder of Atom Bank, is absolutely clear about his career goal: He wants to redefine customers’ everyday relationship with money, he wants to improve it. He is aware that the financial sector is in the midst of a revolution marked by an unstoppable wave of disruption. “The first change is that money is data and data are the main product of our business” he said during his address in South Summit, where he unveiled three essential challenges that all companies must face to survive in this paradigm shift.

Startups and traditional banks come from two very different worlds. But as financial startups begin to play a bigger role in the financial sector, some banks may struggle to relate to the young and dynamic startups. This is not the case for BBVA, which has been engaging with talented entrepreneurs through its BBVA Open Talent contest for the past eight years. The finals will take place this month in Europe, Latin America and the United States (including rest of the world).

Artificial intelligence (AI) made the leap from science fiction to the corporate world some time ago. Amazon and Netflix use it routinely to make purchasing recommendations, iPhone users speak to Siri every day, and banks give investment advice or calculate risks thanks to these technologies. But these are only the first hesitant steps of AI, which is due to have a major impact on the financial sector, as revealed in this report in the magazine Euromoney, and featuring an interview with Marco Bressan, Chief Data Scientist at BBVA.

In the U.K., all-mobile bank startups, requiring only a smartphone or a tablet to access all the features, are the talk of financial services.  Mondo raised £1 million in 96 seconds on Crowdcube in March and Tandem got a U.K. banking licence at the end of 2015.   While it’s still early days for the concept, the quality of the people behind them, the strong funding and the innovative product suggest they’re going to become a permanent feature in Britain’s banking landscape.