BBVA USA announced today that it has received approval to open 15 new branches across Texas, the bank’s largest market in its U.S. footprint.

In June, BBVA’s Group executive chairman held a round of meetings with the bank’s teams in Spain, Mexico, the U.S. and Turkey. At the meetings he went over the situation in each country and shared future challenges. “The pandemic will serve to accelerate our strategic priorities - digitization, data and sustainability - as well as the search for new ways of working,” he explained.

The future will never look the same. If one were to scour news articles and studies around the current health situation, one will find that a good portion of medical experts will convey this concept. It’s difficult to say what the future will look like in multiple facets of society, but it’s safe to say that the ripple effects will be prominent, at least in the beginning.

BBVA's teams in Asia and Colombia secured this cross-border transaction, which will allow Asian client China Harbour Engineering Company Limited (CHEC) to build, operate and service line 1 of the Bogota subway. The landmark agreement will contribute to financing the largest infrastructure project in Colombia’s history, and is also the most ambitious cooperation project the country’s ever signed with China. The transaction is the first one certified by BBVA in Asia in compliance with its sustainable transactional banking framework.

BBVA's unit in Turkey, national leader in innovative loan structuring, has agreed a ‘gender loan’ with four tourism businesses within the Limak Grubu consortium. The loan's interest rates are indexed to criteria evaluating equal opportunities across the group's entire workforce.

Olga Gouveia, lead economist for Financial Systems at BBVA Research, wrote an op ed piece for the Spanish daily paper, Expansión, where she gave a positive appraisal of the European Central Bank liquidity auctions. The ECB auctions aim to increase lending in order to address the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis.