Sending money to friends and family just got faster, more convenient, and a lot more personal. A new online app-based (iOS and Android) service called Tuyyo, launching Monday and powered by BBVA, will upend the $73 billion annual market for remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean from the United States. Globally, the remittance market is set to exceed $600 billion this year and reach close to $629 billion in 2018.

The words “wealth” and “tech” have come together to give rise to a new generation of financial technology companies that create digital solutions to transform the investment and asset management industry.

BBVA now has more than 15m mobile active customers across its global footprint, as its digital strategy continues to prove a success.

In the United States, there are already $20 billion under management by robot advisors and for the moment, the numbers testify to the success. Improving their knowledge of the investor could turn robo-advisors into a financial tool of the first order.

BBVA has crowned DOV-E as its winner in the BBVA Open Talent Global Trends fintech competition, winning €30,000 and a spot at the BBVA Open Summit and Immersion Week in October at the BBVA Group headquarters in Madrid.

DOV-E, based in Israel, provides wireless connectivity using audio technology between any consumer’s mobile device and any merchant platform. It won the award after beating strong competition from hundreds of other entries from across the world.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) is fully immersed in analyzing regulation of financial technology – better known as fintech. In the spring of 2017, the EBA began its first attempt to create a map of fintech and its regulation. The results were published in this document. The EBA found that there are more than 1,500 fintech companies in the European Union. They have detailed information about 282 of these, and 31% are not subject to any sort of regulation.

For some time now, fintech has been a buzzword in the financial industries of the United States and Asia. However, Europe has only begun to realize its importance. Are the digital initiatives in the European Union and the fintech companies up to the challenges of the new environment? That question was addressed by the experts on a panel at the Eurofi Financial Forum 2017 held recently in Tallin, capital of Estonia, which holds the currently holds the EU presidency.

A study by the World Economic Forum (WEF) compares the real impact of fintech companies on the world of finance to their own predictions two years ago. Their conclusion: the fintech companies haven´t met many of their forecasts.

Virtually the entire portfolio of BBVA products in Spain will be available on the mobile by the end of 2017. BBVA has made substantial progress in its digitization process in recent years: The bank's mobile banking app has gone from offering 16% of the products just three years ago, to 82% today, and will reach 92% next December.

The combination of data from financial operations and advanced machine learning techniques allows BBVA to identify patterns and design tools that offer increasingly personalized and intelligent products and services.