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Finance

Finance

Source and GridMarkets have won the 2014 North America and Rest of World BBVA Open Talent Awards in the respective categories of New Banking and Digital Life. The winning prize for both startups will be a contract worth 30,000 euros with BBVA to test their respective products or services. Mexico and the United States were the protagonists in this year’s contest, which included participants from as far afield as India, South Africa, Russia or Singapore.

BBVA is the first bank in Spain to hold an international developer competition, known as ‘datathon’, inviting developers to build new services, applications and contents based on its card transaction data. Innova Challenge provides third parties with data from cards and BBVA point-of-sale terminals in Madrid and Barcelona, in an anonymous way and in compliance with privacy regulations. This initiative is a first step to open the BBVA platform in order to promote innovation inside and outside the bank.

Two London-based fintech start-ups - Everledger, which uses the Blockchain to record ownership of valuables, and Origin Markets, a platform which directly connects corporate bond issuers with institutional investors - have won the 2015 BBVA Open Talent Europe final. OpenTalent, now in its 7th year, seeks to support the fintech ecosystem by finding and supporting the best start-ups across the world, and is part of BBVA’s work to transform its business using digital technology.

The winners of BBVA Open Talent Latin America have been announced. Bitnexo was chosen for its blockchain-based payments solution for companies trading with Asia, and Destacame.cl, which has already been recognized with the Special Financial Inclusion Award, won top honors for its system which creates credit risk profiles based on bill payment histories for basic services.