Getting into certain professional fields can be a difficult task. There are no exact formulas or specific studies that open the door to certain jobs. A clear example of this is financial product trader. This is an attractive career for many because of the chance it offers – not always feasible – of earning a lot of money in a short period of time. But this entails big unknowns, among which is the key question: How do I become a good trader?

As expected the European Central Bank (ECB) yesterday took a further step toward the normalization of its monetary policy. That is BBVA Research’s reading of the situation in its ECB Watch report. The institution headed by Mario Draghi left interest rates unchanged and will continue with its asset-purchasing program, commonly known in English as quantitative easing (QE). The main development that emerged from the policy meeting was the dropping of the “explicit reference” to the possibility of increasing the size of the program. And that already represents a change.

“New York is overrated. What I’m drawn to is Hong Kong, Thailand and the Moroccan desert”. That’s Jessica Hernández’s take on things. Jessica is 28 and lives in Soacha, a modest town in the outskirts of Bogota. She travelled to New York to tell her story to the UN and there she met another fearless girl in the shape of Kristen Visbal’s sculpture, which since March 8 has been locking horns with the bull on Wall Street.

Fair-trade coffee, quality guarantee, ecological tomatoes… consumers read the labels on the things they eat. But is there any way of checking that what they say is correct? In order to do so, you would need a register of the processes to which the product has been submitted, something blockchain can do.

BBVA has teamed up with several global banks to become a member of the Standard Repackaging Documentation platform (SRD). This initiative is a response to investors’ demands for standardization of repackaging transactions. BBVA is the only Spanish bank involved.

The “proptech” companies and the most innovative financial institutions are already offering services that improve the customer experience in the real estate sector.