After the approval of last year’s financial statements in the Annual General Meeting, BBVA is releasing the most relevant information of the year in its report, BBVA in 2016. The report offers a clear and intuitive overview of the Group’s strategy and performance highlights in 2016, with a special focus on the most relevant issues for BBVA’s stakeholders.

• Quorum was over 63%
• The financial statements were approved with more than 99% of votes. And the approval for the management of the business society in 2016 received almost 99% of votes.

The remaining items in the agenda were approved by a large majority.

Francisco González, Group Executive Chairman

Strategy: “We are currently executing our plan - multiplying and improving our projects, anticipating our customers’ needs to improve their experience and increasing the number of customers. Growth in products and solutions is going to be explosive”

2016: “It has been a very good year for BBVA. In a complex environment, our profit increased by almost 32 percent. We improved our risk profile and strengthened our capital base”

Customers: “This great project intends to set a new standard of service in banking by creating more and better opportunities for customers because they will benefit the most from BBVA’s technological progress and transformation”

Carlos Torres Vila, CEO

Goal: “The key to a successful business in the long term is having customers who appreciate us and recommend us”

The Euskalduna Palace in Bilbao hosted BBVA’s annual meeting with its shareholders for yet another year. Group Executive Chairman Francisco González maintained that the bank’s transformation into a digital business is “delivering very tangible results. We have a clear strategic plan, we have the tools, we have the teams and we are already in the plan’s execution stage.” BBVA’s Executive Chairman indicated  in his presentation that growth in products and solutions “is going to be explosive” and will “improve customers’ experience.”

Every Spaniard recycled 62 glass containers in 2016 – three times more than in 2015. Spaniards recycled 752,234 tons of glass in the green recycling bin in 2016, an average of 16.2 kilograms per resident, according to Ecovidrio’s figures published in ABC.

There was a record number of reports of cases of identity theft in the U.K., with 172,919 cases, according to Cifas data published by Finextra. Identity fraud now represents more than half of all cases of fraud registered in Cifas, of which 88% took place online.

Credit card payments in Chile were up 20% in 2016. According to the December report by the bank supervisor, Pulso, the number of card transactions reached 32,139,015 at the end of the year – 20.7% more than the same month in 2015.

An article published by the Financial Times (subscription required) reports that the hedge funds led by women have outperformed a broader benchmark of alternative investment managers over the past five years, raising the question of why there are still so few female portfolio managers.