In a context of increasing competition, marked by the arrival of new players such as digital banks and fintech startups, local banks are rushing to adjust. Digital transformation hasn’t caught Argentina’s financial institutions by surprise, however: they’re ready to invest in creating a better user experience.

Big Data can play an important role in achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which the international community hopes to do by the year 2030. However, to reach this objective, more information and more public-private cooperation is needed.

The technological revolution has the intensity of a tsunami. What’s new today will be old tomorrow, and will give way to new disruptive phenomena.  What’s the next step?

All organizations operate at what is known as the edge of chaos. It is a transition space between order and disorder, a region of bounded instability, where forces both progressive and conservative battle for control. A manager may have a three-year strategy, and the protocol, teams and departments in place to deliver it, but realizing that strategy means contending with countless disruptive events; a new competitor entering the market, a shift in consumer behavior – even, perhaps, the manager’s own desire to retire to a quiet village on the countryside.

Companies cannot afford to turn their backs on technological progress and technology trends. “Technology will be embedded in everything in the digital business of the future,” says the research firm Gartner, in its 'Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2018'.

Gartner predicts that the trends on its list will mark the course of the next decade. They all form part of something the research firm terms the intelligent digital mesh, “an entwining of people, devices, content and services”.

Those three words – intelligent,  digital and mesh – are also the categories into which the research firm divides these essential services. Among them are autonomous robotics, the applications of the Internet of Things and blockchain-based solutions.

When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, he couldn’t publish everything he wanted. The supply of text was limited, censorship prevented him from publishing certain things, there were few authors around and demand for reading materials was low. In the 21st Century, the situation is very different. It’s worth exploring these differences, recalling the process that Marshall McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy.

Argentina, Peru, Colombia and Chile are examples of BBVA’s commitment to digitization and to offering the most advanced services for customers in the all markets where the bank operates. Chatbots, online investment funds and corporate leasing functions are all evidence of the bank’s progress in Latin America.

Today, a large majority of modern apps or services are RESTful APIs and use API definitions to facilitate communications between them, as it saves us from having to worry about the language and the underlying implementation of the remaining components. APIs make even more sense in microservice or serverless architectures with dozens or hundreds of mutually interacting microservices/functions.

UN Global Pulse, a United Nations agency that seeks to use big data for the public good, has announced the winners of Data for Climate Action – an open innovation initiative to find solutions for climate change.  BBVA Data & Analytics collaborated with the initiative by providing statistics on credit and debit card transactions in Spain.