BBVA Group has developed a platform to facilitate mobile payments across all the countries in its footprint. The platform developed by BBVA connects to Visa and Mastercard directly from each country's application and provides the data required to process digital transactions from a smartphone.

Applications for BBVA Open Talent 2019 — the biggest fintech startup competition in the world — are open until 5 July 2019.

The company, in which BBVA invested in 2018, was named best startup in growth stage at the Fintech Germany awards.

The two Spanish companies have met with a selected group of Europe’s most promising startups and scaleups at an event promoted by the European Innovation Council (EIC) of the European Commission. 18 disruptive top-class innovators from 13 countries, including Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway were able to explain their proposals to the Open Innovation teams of both companies

An exceptional user experience and value added features are the keys to differentiating a banking application from its competition. These are the elements that held the most sway when, for the second consecutive year, the consulting firm Forrester chose BBVA's app as the best banking app in the world and gave the Garanti BBVA app in Turkey the best in user experience.

In just three years from inception, German 'startup' solarisBank has become one of the hottest 'fintech' startups. BBVA has been backing the company since 2018.

This new payment method replaces sensitive debit or credit card data with a unique identification code called a ‘token,’ which is used during a digital transaction. Online transactions are therefore more secure because the customer’s actual card data no longer needs to be provided. BBVA has already committed to helping its customers adopt this new payment approach.

Last week during the 2019 first quarter results presentation, BBVA CEO Onur Genç outlined some of the continued progress the bank has been making in its digital transformation.

BBVA has been honoured with three accolades in the 2019 edition of Global Finance Magazine’s The Innovators Awards.

"Hello! Finally, we meet! I have been specifically designed to help you better understand the ins and outs of your daily finances.  I am always available and crunching the numbers is one of my favorite tasks."

This could be the start of a friendship, a virtual friendship, because the virtual assistant is a “bot” enabled in BBVA’s app whose express mission is to better control customer finances. “We call it a  'pseudo-bot’ ... initially resembling conversational interfaces,” explains Sergio Ruiz Navarro, who is responsible for the design/UX of this endearing creature whose mission is to understand if customers do a good job (or not) of managing their money.