Internet sales have soared in recent months, resulting in growth in the ecommerce sector. But if new purchasing habits are to truly take root and survive in the post COVID-19 reality, businesses will have to carefully nurture the customer buying experience. Against this backdrop, artificial intelligence (AI) is not only a tool to help improve the user experience and increase customer satisfaction, it can also facilitate payment management and detect potential fraud.

BBVA USA today announced that it is collaborating with Google to offer consumers a digital bank account through Google Pay, continuing its focus on innovation in the financial industry.

British magazine, ‘The Banker,’ which is part of the Financial Times Group, has announced the results of its digital innovation in banking awards. BBVA emerged as the winner in both Europe and Latin America.

Advances in artificial intelligence and mobile technology have led many banks to consider using virtual assistants to provide their customers with personal and portable financial managers. In this article, BBVA design manager, Julián García Ruiz, describes the challenge BBVA undertook and the path that led to the creation of the bank’s virtual assistant, Blue.

How do cybercriminals think? What techniques do they use and how do they set up to implement them? What are their goals? There’s nothing better than putting yourself inside the bad guy’s mind so you will be ready to react. We tell you how these criminals behave.

Acceleration programmes, like Open Innovation from BBVA helping startups from the fintech ecosystem, are an opportunity to offer tailored support that helps entrepreneurs to refine their model, boost their growth and access investment. In the case of the BBVA programme, the project is bringing to a close nine months of workshops, mentoring and support. For the bank and entrepreneurs, the initiative has provided an opportunity to learn together.

The sixth generation of WiFi delivers faster connectivity, expands its reach, and supports a greater density of connected devices. This technology, which goes hand-in-hand with 5G, will facilitate the rollout of sensors for the Internet of Things (IoT) and the creation of immersive and augmented virtual reality experiences.

A total of 15 new BBVA USA branches will open in early 2021, as announced by the bank recently, with all branches being opened in the bank’s Texas footprint. One of the biggest, and more unique, differences of these modern branches is the new Personal Banker Bar, a feature meant to replace a traditional teller line, and enhance the consumer experience.

Garanti BBVA Vice President İlker Kuruöz, together with Fatih Sarı, journalist and technology columnist, participated in 3T3, a program where they analyzed the pandemic’s impact on business.

Álvaro Garrido has been safeguarding the integrity of BBVA’s assets for the past three years. In his role as Chief Security Officer (CSO), he’s responsible not only for the Group’s physical & digital security, but also for its fraud prevention efforts, an exceptionally broad range of duties for such a large company and, at the same time, a great professional challenge.

The process of choosing startups in open innovation is proving increasingly difficult in the face of the proliferation of emerging companies globally. BBVA has various scouting mechanisms, and to do this it takes into account factors such as the degree of maturity, whether the solution dovetails with the bank’s needs, and the entrepreneurial team’s passion.

BBVA in Spain’s mobile banking app adds an average of 60 new features every year. Users especially appreciated the ability to manage their finances on the app during the lockdown. They also value the channel’s speed – the app opens in just two seconds – and how easy it is to use.  Bank customers gave the app a score of 4.7 on Google – the highest in the industry and close to the maximum score of 5. The app reached this score after the outbreak of the pandemic, when it became and essential tool.

Beyond hastening the adoption of specific technologies – such as telemedicine or robotics – one of the brightest outcomes of the scenario brought about by the coronavirus pandemic has been the unprecedented collaborative spirit that has emerged, which could unleash deeper changes in technological development in the coming years. The challenges posed by the coronavirus aftermath may lead to increasing levels of data sharing and faster deployment of solutions to preserve privacy, which could help lay the foundation for new digital infrastructures.

Reliability, convenience, sustainability, trust, and security are key words consumers and businesses want to associate with their bank. The best example of where these words blend to one concrete concept in the banking industry is in data and technology.

A few weeks ago some colleagues from a development team told us about their worries on the JSON Web tokens (JWT) generation they were doing as part of a new tool integration they were working on. They had heard about several security issues regarding the use of JWT tokens so they asked us for help in order to validate if the tokens they were issuing were correct and met some basic security requirements.

We are currently working on a project to help automate security tests, APICheck, which we’ve recently released as open source. APICheck is comprised of a set of small tools that can be pipe chained in order to run several tests on API requests, so we got down to work with the development of a new tool for validating the JWT they were issuing, jwt-checker, in which we’ve implemented the ability to pass the validations on the tokens we’ll talk about. Below I’ll show you an example of a test implemented using the tool.

BBVA Group executive chairman Carlos Torres Vila participated in this year’s virtual edition of South Summit, the leading fintech event, where he spoke about the challenges facing the banking sector and financial technology in a post-COVID-19 world. “If we are going to have a rapid recovery, the only way is with a model of sustainable and inclusive development,” he added. “Technology and data are the key ingredients, together with people –all of you entrepreneurs who produced ideas– to drive the sustainability agenda.”