BBVA keeps up an active conversation with the entrepreneurial ecosystem during the COVID-19 crisis

“This is the first time that so many BBVA innovation teams from around the world have joined together in an initiative like this,” said Ainhoa Campo, global head of Open Innovation at BBVA. This project was created to “bring us closer to startups and continue to make BBVA’s commitment to innovation in the fintech ecosystem tangible, and also to connect with everyone, providing added value and interesting content to make confinement more bearable,” she explained.

Since the onset of the pandemic, BBVA Open Innovation, ethe area of the bank that connects with the ‘fintech’ world, sought to keep in touch with the entrepreneurial ecosystem. In the early days of confinement, BBVA Open Innovation launched an initiative to ask startups to join forces to send a few words of encouragement to entrepreneurs, to convey the message that “it is time to return to our origins, our home, and continue looking forward”, and that “despite staying at home, we are more united than ever.”

Now, to implement the initiative and continue to support entrepreneurs, the BBVA Open Innovation teams from Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Portugal and Spain worked together to host the InnovaHome Festival, an event comprising talks, presentations, interviews and webinars and featuring innovation leaders from around the world, with a focus on topics as varied as investment, digital transformation, social impact, cybersecurity and financial literacy.

The initiative started on April 23 with the session ‘How to invest in times of confinement’ and will continue with talks on how to deal with the COVID-19 crisis in companies, how to build an attractive business for investors, and how to manage liquidity in times of uncertainty.

The InnovaHome Festival will have sessions every week that will be held in different formats and can be followed from Instagram Live and the BBVA Open Innovation YouTube channel. Through these platforms, BBVA Open Innovation will encourage interaction with users, who will be able to send their own questions to event speakers and moderators.

The idea for this festival came from the BBVA Open Innovation Mexico team, who, after having to suspend scheduled activities with several partners and startups in its Open Space, thought it would be a good option to convert all this programming in an online format so that the audience could enjoy it through social networks. The rest of BBVA’s innovation teams decided to join the initiative.

Online Open Talks

Another of the ways that the BBVA Open Innovation teams stayed close to the ‘fintech’ ecosystem while the crisis lasts was to host online Open Talks, BBVA events that bring together leading experts in this sector to inspire and bring innovation to the world.

The first was held in Colombia on April 22 and consisted of an event broadcast via Webex. ‘Challenges in the economy versus COVID-19 and the role of sustainability’ were discussed, while Alejandro Pacheco, Deputy Resident Representative for the United Nations Development Programme in Colombia, featured as a guest.

The next country to host this new form of event was Mexico, from May 4 to 7, with daily sessions in which ‘digital marketing’ was the main theme.

In addition, BBVA Open Innovation launched Global Virtual Open Talks, involving several countries from the Open Innovation geographies in the same event. This new initiative will run on a monthly basis throughout 2020, starting on May 20, when the first of these events took place, with a focus on ‘‘Fintech’’ post-COVID-19” and involving the Spain, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Argentina teams.

For anyone who would like to know more about these contents, BBVA Open Innovation will publish on in its website and on social media (Instagram, Twitter and Facebook) all news and developments relating to the InnovaHome Festival and Open Talks.