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.

In its third year, the BBVA global ninja hackathon took place virtually for the first time. Local teams representing the digital talent community from seven of the bank’s operating countries participated in the event. Despite the separation by distance, more than 1,000 BBVA ninjas joined the initiative, helping their teams solve technological challenges created by Amazon Web Services (AWS). At this year’s event, U.S. team SQL Injection emerged as the global winner.

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.”

A recent article by MIT Sloan Management Review highlighted the innovations in data wrapping that companies like BBVA and PepsiCo are pushing into the markets.

Operational excellence provides the foundation upon which the hallmarks of superior performance are built. This is true for companies of all sizes in all industries, and BBVA USA is no exception.