BBVA’s venture capital business Propel Venture Partners has led the funding round into one of the three finalists of the bank’s Open Talent competition, just a year after the business scooped a top award.

Sixty candidates worked non-stop to develop an analytical model and come up with a business solution based on datasets provided by BBVA. The competition, hosted last week at Ciudad BBVA, was the last phase of a selection process aimed at recruiting new members to enroll in the ‘Young Data Professionals’ program, a BBVA initiative aimed at developing young advanced analytics talent.

A new strategy and narrower focus will help BBVA Open Innovation build on its 2018 successes.

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.

BBVA held its first Family Cybersecurity Day, an initiative aimed at raising awareness and educating employees and their families about the potential risks derived from the online activities and certain digital habits that are already a part of our daily lives.

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 Finnish startup is to expand to Ireland, Italy, Belgium, France and the Netherlands as demand for its small business current account service increases. The firm has already reached its 150,000 micro business customers milestone.

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.