After the incidents of the previous months (SolarWinds, Codecov,…) it is becoming more evident that it is necessary to have a strong inventory and control over the components with which we build our software, as well as to strengthen the process used to build it.

That list of components of our software is what we called SBOM (Software Bill of Materials), and it’s a key component for managing our supply chain, which is one of multiple entrypoints of vulnerabilities for our software, as the aforementioned incidents have shown.

As a good proof of the importance of securing our SBOM is the Executive Order issued by the US president Joe Biden in May, which will impose new and strict standards for every software that is to be acquired by the United States federal administration, including some measures aimed to improve the security in the Software Supply Chain.

According to ‘Impact of COVID-19 on Consumption in Real Time and High Definition’, a report by BBVA Research, May 2021 card spending was 19 percent higher than in May 2019 (+36 percent y-o-y, i.e. compared to May 2020). Spending in restaurants and leisure grew the most, driven by the lifting of state of alarm restrictions.

The end to mobility restrictions has begun to show in the hotel, restaurant, entertainment, and transport sectors. All of them displayed signs of recovery in May 2021, although at unequal rates depending on the country. This according to ‘The COVID-19 Impact on Consumption in Real Time and High Definition,’ the latest report published by BBVA Research.

After six months of testing with a selected group of users, BBVA Switzerland makes its first crypto-asset trading and custody service available to all its private banking clients.

This competency status is a significant milestone for BBVA Next Technologies as it is a seal of quality recognized by AWS for carrying out high-quality projects in the DevOps field with total confidence.

In the last six years, BBVA’s original team of less than ten designers has bloomed into a community of more than 500. This year the bank earned a special mention at the Spanish National Design Awards. In the meantime, design became a strategic driver of its transformation process, allowing customers to play a leading role by determining the design of its products. BBVA is facing the future trying to scale up its products by globally with efficiency, integrating data into design and exploring new user experience features, such as voice-enabled navigation.

A short meeting first thing in the morning can be more productive than a two hour meeting at midday, and a team working on a project no longer needs to complete one phase to start the next. These are two examples of what BBVA employees have learned since they incorporated agile methodologies into their daily working lives, practices that have been further strengthened in the last year under the pandemic.

BBVA strengthens its offering for multinational companies with BBVA Pivot. Behind the renewal of its global treasury services lies a strategy to conquer a space that still offers great potential for growth. “We want to double the number of corporate clients that have implemented and operate with BBVA Pivot,” says Javier Balbin, Global Head of Enterprise Solutions at BBVA.

The BBVA Turkish unit joins a club of only 16 data centers worldwide with the highest certification.

Luisa Gómez Bravo, Global Head of BBVA Corporate & Investment Banking, has participated in a panel discussion on the recovery of the global banking sector after COVID-19 as part of the “Female Leaders in Finance” conference. This financial news conference, with a focus on female talent in the industry, was organized by HSBC Bank.

Garanti BBVA is aware of the role that teachers play in promoting quality education. For this reason, since the restrictions began in March 2020, the bank and its ÖRAV Academy have transformed the content they offer teachers through their platform, enriching it with additional information and training apps so that teachers can adapt to the changes following the pandemic.

Global Finance has included the BBVA Artificial Intelligence Factory in its ‘World’s Best Financial Innovation Labs’ list for 2021. BBVA AI Factory SL is recognized as a benchmark in the application of artificial intelligence and data analytics in the creation and improvement of banking services worldwide.

Garanti BBVA Mobile’s innovations and benefits have earned the bank an iF Design Award, one of the most prestigious in the world of design.

Changes to Turkey’s banking legislation herald a new stage that will see customers increasingly shifting towards digital banking. In anticipation, Garanti BBVA – the bank that spearheaded the development of online banking in the country – has digitized its entire customer onboarding process and allows banking transactions to be carried out easily, quickly and safely.

Organized for the 14th time by focusing on technology, Digital Age Tech Summit under the corporate sponsorship of Garanti BBVA hosted creative names of the digital world.

José Luis Elechiguerra, a chemical engineer, born in Mexico and with more than 12 years of experience at BBVA, recently took on the role of the Global Head of Engineering and Organization at the BBVA Group.

Recently arrived from BBVA USA where he was in charge of the Client Solutions area, Elechiguerra has accepted the responsibility of being the technological enabler for the bank’s strategy. The way he sees it, without technology it is impossible to talk about sustainability, or helping customers make the best financial decisions, or any other objective set by the BBVA Group. His greatest challenges include consolidating the global application development platform, continuing to explore the potential of cloud computing, helping to make data available to be a smarter bank, and further developing the agile work model so that it expands across the entire organization.

All of this, while continuing to watch the major digital competitors and fintech companies in the rearview mirror – from whom he has learned that banks must be faster in responding to customers’ new demands, as Elechiguerra explains in this interview.