BBVA Wealth Solutions, Inc. (BWS) today announced the launch of its newest digital investment services product, SmartPath Digital Portfolios, a new digital advice solution designed to help investors achieve their financial goals. SmartPath Digital Portfolios—powered by BNY Mellon’s Pershing—delivers an engaging user interface, along with a selection of managed account options, to provide an optimal advisory investment experience and help investment advisors achieve increased efficiencies and scale.

This week, Spanish newspaper El Español will honor Francisco González’s professional career with a Los Leones award. On the occasion of the award, the current BBVA Group Executive Chairman sat down for an interview with the online newspaper to discuss the present and future challenges facing the banking industry at large, and his bank in particular, including his retirement from office, scheduled to take place on December 31, 2018. At BBVA “we’re creating a new bank,” he says. Now the institution customers are more satisfied, more likely to recommend the bank and more loyal.

Whether it’s your first home or your fourth, the whole mortgage process can be confusing and stressful… so many decisions to make, so much jargon to decipher, so many boxes to initial.

One simple word you may hear is “points”. It sounds like such a simple word, but do you really know what points are?  A point is technically one percent of your mortgage amount, or $1,000 for every $100,000 you finance.

With investments on artificial intelligence expected to reach €10 billion by 2020, it is evident that the financial sector is very optimistic about these technologies. However, the level of uncertainty surrounding AI remains almost too high to justify this degree of enthusiasm. In a recently published paper, the World Economic Forum warns about how overhyped misconceptions of what AI really is and what it can deliver may undermine the potential benefits derived from the use of artificial intelligence in finance. In contrast with this vision, other experts concur that AI contributes more to prevent and mitigate risks than to generate them.

BBVA Trader, a platform developed by BBVA entirely conceived for and devoted to trading, allows users to invest in different instruments, including warrants, one of the most popular. Warrants are publicly traded derivatives that leverage an investment on an underlying asset. BBVA Trader allows applying different investment strategies based on its users’ goals, be it just investing, obtaining liquidity, securing capital or hedging risks.

José Manuel González-Páramo on Saturday took part in the annual meeting of the Institute for International Finance (IIF) in Bali held in parallel with the annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. He called for a regulatory framework that treats all market participants equally by establishing a level playing field: “Activities with the same risks should receive the same regulatory treatment” without unnecessary barriers to competition, he said.

The digital revolution is making itself felt in the area of international payments in response to the demands and needs of customers. As a key player in the transformation of the financial sector, BBVA has played an active role in bringing all of the advantages provided SWIFT gpi to its clients. It is the first bank in Spain to offer this service.

After obtaining all required authorizations, BBVA closed the transaction that will transfer its real estate business in Spain to Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. The deal was announced in November 2017. The closing of the transaction results in the sale of 80 percent of Divarian’s share capital to Cerberus, the company created to transfer the real estate portfolio. BBVA is to retain the remaining 20 percent stake.

The CEO and future chairman of BBVA, Carlos Torres Vila, stressed this morning that "privacy should never be the price to pay for a service.” At the IX Financial Meeting organized by KPMG and Spain's daily business journal Expansión he explained that new European regulations for the protection and use of data (GDPR and PSD2) are a step in the right direction, although he called for a level playing field between banks and other sectors.