Whether it’s your first home or your fourth, the whole mortgage process can be confusing and stressful… so many decisions to make, so much jargon to decipher, so many boxes to initial.

One simple word you may hear is “points”. It sounds like such a simple word, but do you really know what points are?  A point is technically one percent of your mortgage amount, or $1,000 for every $100,000 you finance.

BBVA Trader, a platform developed by BBVA entirely conceived for and devoted to trading, allows users to invest in different instruments, including warrants, one of the most popular. Warrants are publicly traded derivatives that leverage an investment on an underlying asset. BBVA Trader allows applying different investment strategies based on its users’ goals, be it just investing, obtaining liquidity, securing capital or hedging risks.

José Manuel González-Páramo on Saturday took part in the annual meeting of the Institute for International Finance (IIF) in Bali held in parallel with the annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. He called for a regulatory framework that treats all market participants equally by establishing a level playing field: “Activities with the same risks should receive the same regulatory treatment” without unnecessary barriers to competition, he said.

The digital revolution is making itself felt in the area of international payments in response to the demands and needs of customers. As a key player in the transformation of the financial sector, BBVA has played an active role in bringing all of the advantages provided SWIFT gpi to its clients. It is the first bank in Spain to offer this service.

After obtaining all required authorizations, BBVA closed the transaction that will transfer its real estate business in Spain to Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. The deal was announced in November 2017. The closing of the transaction results in the sale of 80 percent of Divarian’s share capital to Cerberus, the company created to transfer the real estate portfolio. BBVA is to retain the remaining 20 percent stake.

The CEO and future chairman of BBVA, Carlos Torres Vila, stressed this morning that "privacy should never be the price to pay for a service.” At the IX Financial Meeting organized by KPMG and Spain's daily business journal Expansión he explained that new European regulations for the protection and use of data (GDPR and PSD2) are a step in the right direction, although he called for a level playing field between banks and other sectors.

Nowadays, more and more companies are committed to policies that encourage diversity in their work environments. In a panel at an ICMA Women’s Network event, held in Madrid, a group of women in leadership positions in various sectors of the industry debated issues such as unconscious biases in the workplace and the challenges they have had to face throughout their professional lives.

José Manuel González-Páramo called for Europe to move forward now, not “just when there’s a crisis”, and to conclude the banking union, the capital markets union and the fiscal union to have a “much more robust and genuine euro.” Speaking at the Círculo de Economía in Barcelona, he stressed the role that the ECB played in Europe’s recovery. However, the bank must now go back to its original purpose of “contributing to financial stability and separating supervision from monetary policy.”

Switzerland is the global center of private banking and a country many investors go to in search of diversification. But private banking is much more than that. It involves constant striving to understand the complexity of the financial markets in order to offer customers the best advice possible.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) has launched its European banking transparency exercise for 2018. This is the fifth time the European supervisor has carried out this probe of the banks in the euro area. It will reveal its findings of 130 banks covering 900,000 data points in December.