Digital processing

Artificial intelligence is neither good nor bad in itself, but, as with any tool, it all depends on how you use it. In fact, in cybersecurity it has a dual role: while security teams use its capabilities to bolster defenses, cybercriminals use it to hone their attacks.

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The Turkish central bank recently granted Garanti BBVA an operating license for its new subsidiary, Garanti Payment and Electronic Money Service, Inc., effective February 15, 2024. The innovative new company will begin offering a selected group of customers a beta version of its digital payment solutions under the TAMİ brand in March.

ONE is the new software development culture at BBVA. Thanks to this initiative, over 15,000 developers will work in a more coordinated, collaborative manner, sharing best practices at the bank and in the industry with the goal of creating solutions that best meet customers’ needs.

Accenture and The New York Times have devoted the latest episode of their ‘Built For Change’ podcast to BBVA’s ongoing transformation. David Puente, global head of Client Solutions, describes a process that has been hugely successful for the BBVA app, but which is still far from over. The next big impact: artificial intelligence.

Speaking at the 13th Expansión KPMG Financial Forum, José Luis Elechiguerra, Global Head of Engineering at BBVA, said that "digitization and innovation are key factors in BBVA's profitable growth strategy."

IBM Institute for Business Value interviews Carmela Gómez on the opportunity that embedded finance brings to banks, digital platforms and consumers. The Global Head of Open Banking at BBVA states that embedded finance means a joint transformation of the entire ecosystem, both financial and non-financial, and that for its development to materialize, "we must look at the way in which our customers rely on interacting with financial services within their digital experiences. I believe banking will soon become very different from how we know it today, that’s why we need to fund this transformation now."

BBVA has incorporated a new form of connection to its treasury solutions via API, reducing companies’ integration times for BBVA Pivot Connect by 80 percent. The first three APIs, available on BBVA Pivot, make it possible for companies to manage and trace payments to suppliers, track international payments, and check balances and transactions in accounts in any country.

Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Red Hat, Cisco, IBM, Genesys, Salesforce and Telefónica all form part of BBVA's strategy of technological alliances. Thanks to these partnerships, BBVA has built up ways of working together, set up expert teams and developed cutting-edge tailor-made solutions with the most innovative tech companies, which are key to its growth and digitalization plans.

The bank’s Deputy General Manager Işıl Akdemir Evlioğlu recently spoke with the Turkish edition of Fortune magazine to discuss Garanti BBVA's winning digital banking proposition.

The Spanish tech firm has integrated dasGate in its platform and targets 100 percent growth by 2023, with €26.3 million in revenue and 278 employees.

At the 18th edition of the ‘IMI Conference Turkish Contact Center Awards’, Garanti BBVA was recently presented the award for the ‘Best Digital Solution’. The event was held as part of the Turkey Communication Center Days. All sectors using call center services participated in the competition.

BBVA is the winner in four categories of the 2022 Euromoney Awards for Excellence. The bank is 'Western Europe’s Best Digital Bank,’ 'Latin America’s Best Bank for Corporate Responsibility,’ 'Mexico’s Best Bank' and 'Mexico’s Best Investment Bank.'

Victoria del Castillo Marchese has been the Head of Strategy and M&A at BBVA since December 2018. Prior to this, she held a variety of different roles at the bank, where she began working in 2001. She was recently interviewed by the media outlet Capital & Corporate, where she recalled that “one of BBVA’s priorities is profitable growth” in places where the bank has a presence, such as Spain, Mexico, Turkey and South America. She also emphasized the value of the digital means of expanding the bank’s activity in other countries: “Digitization allows us to enter new markets,” she said.

Remote commerce has grown exponentially in recent years, a trend that has been driven by the pandemic. During lockdowns, ecommerce skyrocketed and payments via apps and cell phones grew at a dizzying rate. On top of this, new technologies were already favoring the emergence of new, more convenient payment methods and boosting e-commerce.

The strategic alliance between the two entities has enabled the integration of Google Cloud into BBVA's technology platform. This collaboration is helping the bank reduce the time it takes to launch digital products, better detect cyber threats, make sustainability one of its core capabilities, and compete with digital fintechs.

Digitization in the banking sector is increasingly taking on different dimensions. Virtual assistants and chatbots have come to life with the support of artificial intelligence technologies. BBVA’s Turkish unit was a pioneer in the country with the launching of Ugi in 2016 and Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger bots a few years later.

BBVA’s Swiss franchise has expanded its cryptocurrency custody and trading service, which now allows for ether operations. This cryptocurrency developed by Ethereum is the second most used cryptocurrency after bitcoin, and completes BBVA Switzerland’s pioneering offer.

“Four Principles for Realizing Strategy with Innovation” by Nils O. Fonstad, Research Scientist and Jukka Salonen, CISR Industry Research Fellow has been published by The MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research, a research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that focuses on the use of information technology and management in complex organizations. The briefing analyzes the bank’s successful implementation process of its single development agenda (SDA) model.

The need to streamline commercial supply chains and their inherent financial flows through digital processes has been a constant over the last 15 years. With the Covid-19 pandemic, that need has become even more relevant.

During the pandemic, working from home has brought with it new trends to organize the return to the office. The hybrid model is already a firm bet in many companies such as BBVA, where employees book through their physical work station via an app the days they work from the office.

The Payment Systems Department (GÖSAŞ) at Garanti BBVA is developing innovative solutions to meet the new needs of both businesses and SMEs while streamlining their digitization process.

Sending money from one side of the globe to the other is apparently very simple, but cross-border payments pose a real challenge. Making international transfers quickly and safely requires a complex structure in which relationships with other financial institutions are essential. The International Financial Institutions area at BBVA has a team of bankers that promotes the creation of a global network of banks that provides customers with the possibility of making international investments and transactions.

Embedded finance allows you to pay for a purchase online without entering bank details or instantly take out a consumer loan on digital platforms outside banks, among many other options. This Bank-as-a-Service model, which allows the integration of financial services via APIs, moved $22.5 billion in 2020, a figure that will increase tenfold in the next four years.

After six months of testing with a selected group of users, BBVA Switzerland makes its first crypto-asset trading and custody service available to all its private banking clients.

In the last six years, BBVA’s original team of less than ten designers has bloomed into a community of more than 500. This year the bank earned a special mention at the Spanish National Design Awards. In the meantime, design became a strategic driver of its transformation process, allowing customers to play a leading role by determining the design of its products. BBVA is facing the future trying to scale up its products by globally with efficiency, integrating data into design and exploring new user experience features, such as voice-enabled navigation.

In 2007 BBVA set off on its transformation journey with the aim of servicing customers through digital channels, making DIY capabilities the cornerstone of our strategy. As a result we achieved exponential trends in sales through digital channels, while customer experience was improved. Now, the bank is immersed in a new stage, focusing on growing our customer base, leveraging on our digital channels and those of third parties. Moreover, it already faces the next challenge: provide proactive and personalized advice to our clients, supported by technology and data.

A short meeting first thing in the morning can be more productive than a two hour meeting at midday, and a team working on a project no longer needs to complete one phase to start the next. These are two examples of what BBVA employees have learned since they incorporated agile methodologies into their daily working lives, practices that have been further strengthened in the last year under the pandemic.

Luisa Gómez Bravo, Global Head of BBVA Corporate & Investment Banking, has participated in a panel discussion on the recovery of the global banking sector after COVID-19 as part of the "Female Leaders in Finance" conference. This financial news conference, with a focus on female talent in the industry, was organized by HSBC Bank.

BBVA and Ant Group (Alibaba affiliate) have signed an agreement to collaborate on the integration of financial services in their platform, Trusple. Based on blockchain technology, this network is aimed to accelerate the digital transformation and facilitate the financing of international trade operations, with a special focus on small and mid-sized businesses.