Europe recognizes BBVA’s contribution to the digitization of financial services
The European Commission’s Fintech Task Force held its first conference in Brussels. BBVA was the only incumbent bank invited to the meeting where the Group’s contribution to promoting digital financial services was recognized.
The Fintech Task Force is a working group that emerged from the Digital Banking Roundtable, a high level meeting organized by the European Commission. At the time, it brought together EU authorities with CEOs of top European companies, including BBVA’s CEO, Carlos Torres Vila.
In this first conference, Beatriz Giménez Monlleo, Head of Strategy in New Digital Business at BBVA, participated in the panel discussion “Regulatory and Supervisory Innovation” where she shared companies’ interest in innovating and the need to create equal conditions and proportionality in regulation to enable innovation. Fintech startups like the Germany mobile banking company N26, PayPal and Leetchi-Mangopay also attended.
BBVA’s representative stressed the importance of a European framework that fosters cybersecurity and underscored the introduction of PSD2 and the financial platforms as future evolutions that will have a major impact on the sector.
Giménez Monlleo also suggested avoiding the antagonism many seek to create between fintech startups and incumbents as there are numerous opportunities for them to work together and complement each other. She also called attention to the importance of a European experimentation model to facilitate the provision of cross-border financial services and to streamline pilots of innovative solutions from other countries once they have been authorized for a national sandbox.
The European Commission’s Fintech Task Force recognized the need to work on different topics related to innovation such as digital identification, authentication, security, regtech, as well as facilitating experimentation and promoting technological education.
FISMA, the Directorate‑General in charge of EU policy on banking and finance, took advantage of the event to launch a public consultation about fintech startups and an action plan on financial services for consumers. The former aims to identify the elements that allow the EC to work on a better approach to technological innovation for financial services. The latter seeks to measure the potential of the technological developments and digitization to improve EU citizens’ access to financial services.
The conference confirmed that BBVA continues to lead the financial industry for European regulators and the other stakeholders, and the bank promotes the creation of a new regulatory framework that encourages the sector’s digital transformation and provides operational security.