BBVA gives employees control over their training with a token-based initiative

Four thousand BBVA employees in Spain and Argentina are now using the new BBVA Campus Wallet, an open platform that seeks to give a boost to continuous training with on-site and online courses and workshops. "We are living in a time of transformation when the capacity to learn will become the principal competitive advantage for any organization,” said Ricardo Forcano, BBVA's Global Head of Talent and Culture.

BBVA Campus Wallet works by initially assigning each employee a certain number of tokens – that do not have any monetary value – and that can be used to take courses. At the same time, new tokens can be obtained when an employee takes online courses or gives training to his or her colleagues in an area of his/her expertise.

This new platform “assigns value to training through tokens that certify each hour of training taken or given to other colleagues, and opens the doors to all employees – independent of their role – so that they can take courses that until now have only been available by invitation,” added Forcano.

The employee-come-instructor is assigned tokens, the amount depending on the number of participants in his or her session. Tokens are assigned for each hour of training given and for each student in the session. To automate the process, QR codes are generated and should be scanned by the employees participating in the training. An employee can use his accumulated tokens to access classes and workshops.

Thus, BBVA professionals can now take an active role in the Group’s training initiatives. Those who are the most motivated now have more opportunities to attend courses and participate in the most popular classes and special events, such as specialist meetings with the bank's top executives.

Tokenomics

The BBVA Campus Wallet model is disruptive in its use of tokens – a concept that is normally used in blockchain ecosystems – as it is a tool that lets employees receive greater value from training, while also giving them greater flexibility when it comes to choosing the skills they want to strengthen.

“We are global pioneers when it comes to using tokens for training in a corporate environment. For the first time, BBVA is exploring token-based economic models (tokenomics or cryptoconomy),” asserts Carlos Kuchkovsky, BBVA’s CTO for New Digital Businesses.

The tokenomics model on which BBVA Campus Wallet is based involved designing a system to manage supply and demand in such a way as to keep a sufficient number of tokens in circulation so that training would reach all of BBVA's teams, but without saturating the “market” with excess tokens that would then undermine the value of the training.

“We are not only learning at a technological level, we are developing a decentralized access-to-training model that involves the design of a new open system based on these tokens,” said BBVA’s Head of Training Pilar Concejo.

The next step of this project is to take the leap into the Ethereum network. BBVA is preparing a trial for this platform so that all token exchanges will be publicly registered and the tokenomics defined in smart contracts. This entails a very important step in BBVA’s firsthand experience with the potential related to public blockchain networks.

Great acceptance

The current pilot involving 4,000 employees has been very well received. Since it kicked off in February of this year, 57% of BBVA Campus Wallet users have taken at least one class and 20,833 new tokens have been created. The most popular courses are those related to legal topics (compliance with new regulation), new digital skills, financial products and corporate values.

In the first phase, participants included professionals from the holding area in Argentina and BBVA Spain’s northwest delegation, including the network of offices. Specifically, it has been these participants who have been the most active: 75% of them have taken at least one course during the trial period.

"It has been a huge success and demonstrates that BBVA Campus Wallet is a useful tool for promoting continuous education in our organization,” Concejo said.