The BBVA Research team has published its Economic Outlook for first quarter 2020, offering a look at a number of timely events and their anticipated economic impact.

BBVA Research published its January auto sales chartbook, noting vehicle sales were 16.9 million in 2019, down 1.7% from 2018. While the sales results are still solid, 2019 sales were the lowest since 2014.

According to the Economic Outlook published this week by BBVA Research, GDP growth is expected to moderate in 2019, while the risk of recession remains elevated over the next 24 months.

José Manuel González-Páramo, Executive Member of the Board and the Head of Global Economics, Regulation and Public Affairs at BBVA, attended a meeting on the challenges facing the banking industry’s regulatory architecture on an international and local level.  He spoke of the importance of further developing the Basel III framework, as well as the need to implement it in a consistent and flexible manner.

Labour’s share of national income has dropped in most of the developed countries and emerging economies in the past few decades. This trend is not common across industries: the share of income accounted for by wages has seen an increase in the service industry, while it has recorded a fall in the other industries.

Investment in infrastructure is crucial for sustainable growth and development inclusion. However, in Latin America there is a gap between supply and demand for such projects, both in terms of physical and digital infrastructure. To offset this lack of investment, private financing needs to be encouraged.

José Manuel González-Páramo, BBVA’s Executive Director Responsible for Global Economics, Regulation & Public Affairs, will chair the recently created Spain-Peru Council Foundation, a non-profit body set up with the aim of fostering relations between the two countries.

BBVA took part in the first seminar organized by the Institute of Compliance Officers (IOC).  Executives of Spanish multinationals addressed the main challenges facing the profession in applying current regulations within a company. They underscored the fundamental role of the compliance officer in companies committed to transparency and good corporate governance.

The beginning of the normalization of monetary policy in 2018 should bring greater profitability for banks, a larger investor appetite and a positive outlook for the stock market. However, what is perhaps more important, the new policy will enable banks to meet one of their principal goals: supporting economic growth by financing companies and private individuals.

A chronic deficit in infrastructure for telecommunications and logistics has hindered  Argentina’s competitiveness in the tourism industry. Even so, since 2015 the country has moved up seven positions in the World Economic Forum’s biannual report on Latin America.

Argentina’s mega-deposit of non-conventional hydrocarbons is attracting investor attention at home and abroad. With pricing and labor costs now settled, investment figures are starting to arrive: President Macri has announced $5 billion, private companies estimate $8 billion and the total figure for the coming years stands at $120 billion.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) and BBVA have joined forces to help provide Spanish SMEs the funding they need to implement their digitization and innovation strategies. EIB Vice President Román Escolano, and the Head of BBVA Spain, Cristina de Parias, signed an agreement today in Madrid through which the EIB will provide BBVA €150 million to finance SME investment projects related to innovation and digitization. BBVA will provide an additional €150 million of its own resources to fund this new line of credit.

Car sharing and driverless cars are shaking the very foundations of the automobile industry. Will technology make car ownership obsolete?

The refugee crisis, political events and the social reaction to them, natural disasters such as Hurricane Harvey or Hurricane Irma, the sentiments of people or central banks… there is an ever-increasing number of events whose economic impact, in a world of growing risk and uncertainty, is hard to gauge using traditional methods. That’s where ‘Big Data’ and ‘Data Science’ techniques come in, helping to quantify these trends from micro to macro level.

The European Commission (EC) and the European Banking Authority (EBA) have published their work plans for 2018. The documents describe the specific activities and tasks the organizations plan to carry out next year. Both proposals place increasing importance on the fintech sector, since it could bring about a radical change the financial industry.

The revolution in the automobile industry isn’t just about driverless cars. Blockchain technology will also have an impact on the sector, especially on the internal processes of companies.

Sex, religion, and politics, along with harmony and trust, gave birth to money. At first, there was barter. Later came coins and bills, which have now given way to the network age, a world in which space and time have disappeared and transactions are conducted in bits. In order to understand the present and predict the future, Chris Skinner reflects on the history of money in his book, ‘The Next Step: Exponential Life’, which can be downloaded online free of charge as part of BBVA’s OpenMind project.

After seven years of negotiations, the Canada-Europe Trade Agreement, CETA, has entered into force provisionally.  Under this bilateral agreement, the most ambitious signed to date by Brussels, most custom duties levied on trade flows between both countries will be scrapped.

Speaking this morning at the 22nd annual meeting organized by Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London, Chief Financial Officer Jaime Sáenz de Tejada explained some of the key aspects BBVA’s strategy to investors.  “BBVA is well positioned for the new growth cycle”, thanks to a solid balance sheet and capital position, as a result of the company’s efforts in recent years, its geographic diversification and forward-looking transformation strategy.

Jackson Hole is a town of only 9,000 inhabitants located in a valley in the middle of the Rocky Mountains in the US State of Wyoming. Apparently, there is nothing newsworthy about it, and, so, why have we been reading and hearing its name so often in the media lately?

Garanti Bank believes that for any economy to achieve further growth, the participation of women in the labor force is crucial. Women must be encouraged to be entrepreneurs, and women- owned businesses must be supported. Garanti took action in 2006, becoming the first private bank to define  women entrepreneurs as a separate client segment. “To empower women entrepreneurs”, Garanti Bank has had a sustainable Women Entrepreneurs program over a decade. In this respect, the activities focus on four core areas; access to finance, encouragement, education and penetrating new markets.

If you ask scientists in the field of artificial intelligence when they expect fiction to become reality and robots’ intelligence to exceed that of humans, they would likely say it’s right around the corner, sometime between 2030 and 2050.

The Pacific Alliance, made up of Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, is a regional economic and comercial powerhouse.  This area grows more than the average in Latin America. BBVA Research expects GDP growth of 1.6% and 2.3% in 2017 and 2018, respectively.  “The Pacific Alliance is a success story in integration.  And not by chance.  It shares an ambition and a set of values behind this policy, on how prosperity should be reached,” said Jose Manuel González-Páramo, executive director of BBVA in Santander.

All eyes are already set on Hamburg, where, under Germany’s presidency, the G20 leaders will be meeting today and tomorrow to agree on a program to deliver on the goal set in this year’s slogan: “Shaping the interconnected world.”

Like “Big Data” or “Artificial Intelligence,” blockchain has become a fashionable concept. But, how will its application to business evolve? And when will it be a daily reality?

BBVA is one of the founding members of the recently announced Lyra Network, Spain’s first multisectoral consortium, founded to combine efforts in the creation of a cross-cutting, open-code and neutral platform based on the ‘blockchain’ and distributed ledger technologies (DLT).

Free Wi-Fi, reservations by mobile phone or requesting a massage via WhatsApp. Travelers today are digital and hotels cannot ignore the needs of their guests – even though new concepts are appearing where disconnecting is in vogue, such as Digital Detox. Modern travelers can choose the option that best suits their needs.

For two days, the corporate community of the G20 – the Business 20, or B20 – met in Berlin to discuss how to create a sustainable global economy in the future. At the end of the summit, the B20 presented its 20 recommendations for the G20 political leaders to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. BBVA played an important role in the meeting.

BBVA today became an official member of Hyperledger, an open-source collaborative effort to advance the use of blockchain in different economic and corporate sectors. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, this international initiative brings together a large group of companies working in finance, technology, manufacturing and the Internet of Things. By joining Hyperledger, BBVA also became a member of The Linux Foundation.

While ISIS lost ground in Syria and Iraq, Al-Qaeda resumed its offensive operations. Meanwhile, tensions between Russia and Ukraine stabilized after last month’s sharp conflict escalation. Geopolitical tensions in China could intensify as uncertainties regarding the US policy stance in the region remained and North Korea remains testing.

For more information, please visit BBVA Research’s website

The automotive industry is getting ready for a new era in which vehicles’ connectivity will be just as important as their engines. Silicon Valley’s influence over the sector’s future continues to grow.

– Income: Net interest income increased 3.9% in 2016 (+14.9% stripping out the impact of currencies). The fourth quarter was the year’s highest (€4.39 billion). Cost-containment efforts improved the efficiency ratio (51.9% in 2016)

– Risks: BBVA Group’s NPL ratio improved to 4.9% in December (from 5.4% at the end of 2015), with coverage ratio of 70%

– Capital: BBVA reached a fully-loaded CET1 ratio of 10.90%, after generating 58 basis points in the year. The Group maintains its 11% target for 2017

– Transformation: At the end of December 2016, BBVA’s digital customer base stood at 18.4 million (+20% y-o-y). Mobile customers grew 38% to 12.4 million

– Dividend: BBVA plans to implement the shareholder remuneration policy announced in 2013, which aims to distribute between 35% and 40% of profits to dividend payouts, with a 100% cash dividend

The BBVA Global Markets Research team presented the conclusions of its 2017 strategic equity report. According to BBVA analysts, the positive cyclical momentum is set to continue, with the metal & mining, oil & gas, construction materials, healthcare and telecommunications sectors becoming the best performing industries in Europe. In Spain, the Real Estate sector is expected to be the most dynamic in 2017.

46 years ago, in 1971, a group of business leaders reunited under the patronage of the European Comission and some industrial associations. The economist Klaus Schwab chaired the first meeting, with 440 attendants from more than 30 countries in Davos, Switzerland. In this reunion, the European Economic Forum was founded as a non-profit organization with its headquarters in Geneva.

Ever since then, thousands of political and business leaders, artists and enterpreneurs have met in the anual Davos-Kloster meeting. The following 15 milestones are only some of the main events that have marked the history of the World Economic Forum.

Every January, Las Vegas becomes the tech capital of the world. Once again, this year the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, touched down on the gambling mecca to kick off the technology season.

In the last five years, Paraguay’s economy grew at an annual average rate of around 5% – one of the highest in the region. This economic performance is especially remarkable considering it occurred in a rather volatile international environment, characterized by turbulent international financial markets, lower capital inflows to emerging economies and falling prices for metals and agricultural products. The Paraguayan economy was also affected by declining activity of some the region’s most significant trade partners.

The fall of Lehman Brothers made it clear that the size of a bank can be important. Its collapse demonstrated the impact that an institution’s bankruptcy could have on the whole financial system and its repercussions for a country’s entire real economy. As a result, the G20 authorities sought to protect financial stability. Their first step was to identify other systemic banks.

Market analysts reacted positively to the results disclosed by BBVA, which in many cases outperformed their forecasts. Reports cite both the bank’s solid set of results and strong capital generation capacity as the factors that have allowed it to achieve its 11% fully loaded CET1 ratio goal ahead of its proposed 2017 date.

BBVA today reported financial results for the first nine months of 2016. According to BBVA CEO Carlos Torres Vila, “it has been a good quarter, with solid growth in recurring revenues, cost control, and stability in risk indicators. Furthermore, we have already achieved the capital goal we had set for 2017.”

These are the 5 keys to understanding BBVA’s results:

-Income: Positive trends in recurring revenues (NII plus fees and commissions) continued between January and September, boosting gross income to €18.43 billion (+5.1% y-o-y)

-Risks: The Group’s NPL ratio remained stable and stood at 5.1% at the end of September, the same level as in December 2012, while the coverage ratio was 72%

-Capital: BBVA achieved its 2017 capital goal ahead of schedule. The fully-loaded CET1 ratio stood at 11%, with a capital generation of 29 basis points in the quarter

-Transformation: BBVA’s digital customer base stood at 17.2 million (+20% in the past year). Of these, 11 million are mobile customers (+41%)

The BBVA Group earned €2.8 billion between January and September 2016, up 64.3% from the same period a year earlier. Stripping out the impact of corporate operations and currency fluctuations, growth reached 15.0%. Net attributable profit rose to €965 million in the third quarter.

The core activity of a bank is financial intermediation. This function entails using resources from customers (liabilities) to offer financing to the same or other bank customers (assets). Therefore, it is essential to be able to understand a bank’s balance sheet and each line linked directly to customers.

This article is the first of a series that will focus on BBVA’s long history. Over a number of chapters, bbva.com wants to recap some of the highlights of the bank’s almost 160 years of activity, thanks to which it has become one of the most renowned institutions throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Between 20 and 30 per cent of people in the US and Europe are working independently in the so-called “gig economy” according to a new study that counts moonlighters as well as full-timers.

As part of the IMF’s annual meeting in Washington, José Manuel González-Páramo participated yesterday in the B-20 meeting, the international business equivalent of the G20. BBVA’s Executive Director used the opportunity to urge the G20 to develop a clear regulatory framework that complement growth economic measures.

The BBVA Group’s Chief Financial Officer participated in Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Annual Financials CEO Conference in London today. The event is one of the most important banking forums in the world and includes only qualified investors. Jaime Sáenz de Tejada used his presentation to underscore BBVA’s main competitive advantages.

In March this year, the European Central Bank announced the second TLTRO program (targeted long-term refinancing operations). These long-term financing operations aim to stimulate lending in the euro zone. The program is comprised of four auctions and the results of the second one were published today. The amount of additional liquidity asked  has been 34bn euros.

Europe hopes to end the tax breaks that some countries in the region offer to major corporations. The New York times published an overview of all the battle fronts in the current crusade led by Denmark’s Margrethe Vestager, European Commissioner for Competition.