Every day, we ask our brains to make decisions, about what to wear, what to order, which shoes to buy, which route to take to work. Some of these decisions are made so automatically, we aren’t even aware we’re making them. Our brains do that on purpose — relying on shortcuts and preferences — to avoid the continuous ongoing stress of making the same decisions again and again.

Garanti Bank presented its initiatives to combat climate change at the 10th Energy Efficiency Forum and Fair. The bank has increased both its portfolio of sustainable loan options and its financing of innovative projects aimed at supporting green and renewable investments.

Last week, BBVA Compass announced its annual Small Business Month, which includes special offers for small business clients, seminars and contests designed to help entrepreneurs elevate their operations.

Garanti Bank provides its SME clients a dedicated in-branch customer relationship manager who support clients in their banking needs. Now, these clients have access to a new service: Central Customer Service (Merkezi Müşteri Hizmetleri, or MHT). This new structure aims to provide clients a faster response to queries and transactions when the volume of requests is high

BBVA Compass RealTime ARP™ has been named the 2019 Innovator in Cash Management by Global Finance Magazine, as part of the publication’s annual The Innovators 2019 awards.

BBVA Group Executive Chairman Carlos Torres Vila was responsible for welcoming participants to the 87th edition of the Endeavor’s ‘International Selection Panel’, which is currently taking place in Madrid. Entrepreneurs have a really important role:  they can drive the society creating wealth and jobs, increasing competitiveness and fostering better use of resources,” said Torres Vila.

Every May, the Small Business Administration, and other organizations invested in entrepreneurship, celebrate National Small Business Week, recognizing the contributions of small business owners across the country.

In an article published a few months ago in’The New Yorker‘ the British writer John Lanchester explains that in order to write a novel about London, he had to begin by trying to understand “the world of money.” Although Lanchester isn’t shy on culture – he grew up between Calcutta, Brunei, and Hong Kong; and was educated at Oxford – his reading about the economy required something of an effort.

Ricardo Forcano, BBVA’s Global Head of Engineering and Organization, participated in the Association for the Advancement of Management’s (APD in Spanish) session on Agile Organizations, where he presented how BBVA is transforming its organization and work methods. “It’s a constant learning process,” Forcano said, referring to BBVA’s efforts to incorporate  the agile methodology across all of its central areas. As a result, the bank is able to provide its customers new solutions more effectively.

In recent months, BBVA Next Technologies has devoted some effort into researching tools and techniques for interpreting machine learning models. These techniques are very useful to understand the predictions of a model (or make others understand them), to extract business insights from a model that has managed to capture the underlying patterns of customers interest, and to debug models in order to ensure they make the right decisions for the right reasons.

In this article we will explain how we have applied these techniques to avoid deploying flawed models into production that seemed totally correct a priori according to standard validation methods.

Thirty years ago this month the internet came online giving consumers the ability to educate themselves on various products and services long before they ever spoke to an expert. For financial services, it signaled a shift in how bankers worked with customers.

NASA’s Space Apps Challenge, one of the world’s most popular hackathons, has, once again, awarded a group of Spaniards, in this case the time behind ‘Galaxy Quest.’ The project helps processing real data collected by the Hubble telescope through a ‘gamification’ process.  But not only that:  It is the first step in developing an artificial neural network using these data, and a new communications channel between NASA and users.  José Luis Martín-Oar, service designer at BBVA and one of the team’s members, tells us everything about the project.

Garanti Bank’s Digital Car Loans took home the bronze medal in the Best Sales Solutions category at the 2019 Stevie Awards. The new product allows customers to calculate payment plan options when purchasing a vehicle – part of the bank’s efforts to make life easier for their customers.

Garanti Bank recently published its 2018 Integrated Annual Report with an important new feature. The report includes a “True Stories” theme this year: real stories about the experiences Garanti employees have had with customers across Turkey, in their own words. Garanti is the first and only bank in Turkey to publish an integrated annual report that includes information on the value the bank creates for customers.