Innovation, teamwork, knowledge acquisition and use of new technological capabilities are essential to developing new products and services that are more in line with customer needs. The BBVA Global Ninja Hackathon accordingly set the challenge of creating a prototype to attract and/or retain customers using artificial intelligence and data, in partnership with IBM. Did anyone manage it?

Endeavor, the global entrepreneurship organization, convened four European banks at its event 'Leading Innovation in Financial Services' to seek synergies and formulas that promote innovation. Ainhoa Campo, global manager of Open Innovation at BBVA, pointed to the “robust growth” of fintech’s ecosystem in southern Europe.

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.

BBVA has launched Travel Packs; a new fully digital service that allows customers to save on fees and commissions during their travels abroad. Customers will be able to select the plan that best suits them, choosing from basic, standard and premium, and enjoy the advantages that each one provides; all without having to take out a new card. This new service is available for more than seven million debit and credit cards issued by the entity to individuals.

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.

BBVA is the first bank to receive a special mention in the design category during Spain's National Innovation and Design Awards (Premios Nacionales de Innovación y de Diseño), organized by the Ministry of Science and Innovation. The award was presented by the King and Queen of Spain in Granada.

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.