BBVA Spain earned the highest overall score in Forrester Research report, entitled “2017 Online Banking Functionality Benchmark.” Forrester analyzed 13 European retail banks’ secure websites for the report, including institutions in the United Kingdom, France, Turkey, the Netherlands and Italy. BBVA’s Turkish bank, Garanti, was also ranked second on the list. BBVA also received the highest overall score in Forrester’s July report “Global Mobile Banking Benchmark 2017.”

The global remittance market is slated to be at an all-time high in 2017, according to BBVA Research’s Yearbook of Migration and Remittances, and the U.S. has the lionshare of the market.

The security of online identity has never been a more pressing issue as more and more people bank, shop and run their lives through digital channels.

The number of companies and investors betting on blockchain continues to grow. But how did it come about? What was needed to develop bitcoin, its first practical application? And who were the pioneers of blockchain?

It was a record-breaking week for BBVA Spain, particularly in digital records. From Nov. 20 through Nov. 27, the period including "Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday,” the number of consumer loans contracted at BBVA Spain reached unprecedented levels, with 54% coming through digital channels.

The most impressive thing at this year’s Blockchain Summit in London was the enthusiasm and wide array of use cases for blockchain on show. Starting with its origins of digital currency and current evolution to ICOs (the abbreviation for initial coin offering) to applications in the energy and real estate sectors, there is seemingly no problem too big that it can’t be solved via blockchain technology.

The European Commission has published regulatory technical standards (RTS) that are part of the Payment Services Directive, or PSD2. The standards ensure greater security when paying for goods and services in Europe, as well as for third party access to bank customers’ data.

BBVA, in collaboration with Wave, conducted the first pilot that uses blockchain to automate the electronic submission of documents in an import-export transaction between Europe and Latin America.  Thanks to Wave’s solution, which uses Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and blockchain, BBVA was able to reduce the time required to send, verify and authorize an international trade transaction, which normally takes from seven to ten days, to just 2.5 hours.

The APIfication phenomenon is by no means restricted to the banking sector. At the API Forum held this week in Madrid, insurance and entertainment companies participated, together with BBVA, to discuss the keys to designing APIs capable of attracting developers.

Near Field Communication (NFC) technology enables wireless communication between two electronic devices that are close to each other. This form of data exchange is not new – it first began to be used in 2002, although it wasn’t until 2016 and 2017 that many brands, banks and organizations included it in their business models. This has led to major advances in contactless and mobile payment methods, based on this technology.