Luisa Gómez Bravo (BBVA): “The finance team plots out the strategic path for the transformation of organizations”
The finance department plays a pivotal role in the transformation of an organization. Although the CFO (chief financial officer) has traditionally been viewed as the guardian of a company’s finances, they happen to play a much bigger role. They help to shape the strategic roadmap needed to embark on this transformation and allocate the resources to make it all happen. This is what Luisa Gómez Bravo, Global Head of Finance at BBVA, had to say in a recent interview published by Forbes magazine, together with Carmen de Pablo, Chief Financial, Strategy and Sustainability Officer at Moeve, and Laura Abasolo, Chief Financial and Control Officer at Telefónica.
In BBVA’s case, the finance department has played a key role in tackling the two major transformation challenges that the banking sector has faced in recent years: digitalization and sustainability: “At BBVA we have gone through four phases of digitalization,” explains Gómez Bravo. “The final phase, focusing on information and data, lets us offer customers a better service and value proposition.”
Notably, this progress enabled BBVA to acquire more than 11 million new customers in 2023 and a further 8.5 million in the first nine months of 2024.
Gómez Bravo acknowledges in the interview that sustainability is also a major challenge: “We have to support customers not only in the energy transition, but also on the social side,” she explains. “We have committed €300 billion to generating sustainable business.”
To achieve the objectives, the CFO underlines the importance of the values that are shared by everyone at BBVA: working as a single team, putting the customer first, and working with ambition, always with the desire to do more. And against this backdrop, “the CFO is the go-to figure for the various areas and departments... the guardian of financial health,” she concludes.