Technological disruption can help banks comply with the ever-expanding body of financial regulatory requirements more efficiently. This was one of the takeaways of the Financial Stability Conference held in Berlin, in which José Manuel González-Páramo participated. BBVA’s Executive Board Director analyzed the regulatory framework that has emerged in the wake of the financial crisis, the need to find the right balance between financial stability and regulatory efficiency and the influence of new technologies in regulatory compliance.

BBVA Research has upgraded its Latin America 2017 growth forecast by 30 basic points, citing improvement in domestic demand in Mexico and Peru. The BBVA Group study service expects the region to grow 1.1% in 2017 and 1.6% in 2018.

Consumers might see their products at grocery stores across Texas, on airplanes, or at their factory nestled in Houston’s historic East End, an up-and-coming community undergoing a rebirth. Pita Pal Foods, LP is much more than a company producing a suite of Mediterranean products and gourmet foods:  it’s a symbol of how far East End has come.

Antoni Ballabriga, Global Head of Responsible Business at BBVA, took part this Tuesday in a regional roundtable on the progress of sustainable financing, in an event organized in Switzerland by the UNEP Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) in association with the Swiss Sustainable Finance platform (SSF).

The European Commission has published a legislative proposal to create a sort of European Securities and Exchange Commission – that is, a European agency that would centralize some of the stock exchange supervision competencies of the national authorities. Once it is approved, part of the activity that takes place on the European exchanges would come under control of the new European authority.

BBVA and BBVA Bancomer are piloting an FX matching application developed by Calypso Technology, a leading provider of cloud based cross asset trading software solutions for the financial markets, and enterprise software firm R3. The application, which runs on R3’s Corda platform and is facilitated by Calypso’s cloud services, has already been used by the two banks to match a test FX trade.

Non-performing assets, monetary policy and digitization are the three most pressing challenges that EU banks are facing, according to José Manuel González-Páramo. BBVA’s Executive Board Director participated in the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Institute of International Finance (IIF) that took place in Washington D.C. last week, which he attended together with a large delegation of BBVA executives.

For the European Central Bank, the relevance that fintech already has in the financial sector is becoming increasingly clear.  The latest example of this is the public consultation it has just launched to establish draft guides to bank licensing, not only for banks with traditional business models, but also for companies offering banking services based on innovative technologies, commonly known as fintech.

The European Central Bank has launched a public consultation on an addendum to its guidance to European banks on non-performing loans (NPL). The addendum specifies that as of January 1, 2018 banks must completely provision for the unsecured portion of all new NPLs after two years at the latest and for the secured portion after seven years at the latest.