Samsung and BBVA today presented the iris scanning feature, which will allow BBVA customers with Samsung-compatible smartphones to log on to the bank's Spanish mobile banking app just by looking at their displays[1].

Manufacturers are working hard to ensure that their smartphones are bestsellers. It’s a race in which the brands and models remain virtually unchanged. The iPhone 7 was the top-selling smartphone in the third quarter of 2017, with a total of 375.9 million devices sold. This represents a 5.9% increase over the same period last year.

One of the things about huge conferences like Money 20/20 in Las Vegas is that you get to see the ideas that will shape the future of the banking sector.

They’re a feature of every computer keyboard, but most people don’t know what they´re used for. However, the “F” keys on any computer actually contain some very useful functions.

Big Data is already a reality that is changing the commercial offering of companies. Its impact is already being felt in a whole gamut of industries, from finance to insurance and even non-profit organizations.

BBVA has revealed how a redesign of its award winning mobile app has led to astonishing results in its sales figures.

Madrid hosted last week the Service Design Global Conference (SDGC17), a leading event in the world of service design that pays special attention to how this discipline is changing the world of banking. BBVA took part in one of the sessions to explain how design is, without a doubt, a key element in the success of its financial products and in satisfying customer needs at a time of great challenges for banking.

At BBVA Labs, we follow the test pyramid concept proposed by Mike Cohn. We have a large collection of unit tests that are easy to implement and which are run at every change in code; a collection of acceptance tests which are run whenever the previous tests are passed; and finally, end-to-end tests that are only run to unlock a function.

The complexity of implementing these tests increases as you move up in the pyramid. End-to-end tests, where service integration is also tested, requires putting in place the infrastructure, the services to be tested and the integrated services. Setting up a testing environment, test implementation and execution are significantly more complex than unit tests.

In addition to the cost of running these tests, another problem arises when a service changes the message format. Big bang deployment (deploying the service and its dependents at the same time) is to be avoided as this type of change breaks the continual deployment) . Therefore, for a period of time, the service provider has to offer support for two versions of the message while customers update to the new one, but consumer tests only look at one version of the producer.

At BBVA Labs, we conducted an experiment to reduce the number of services to deploy in tests and to ensure that communication among services from different domains is maintained throughout the software product’s life cycle in a continual deployment system. The decision was made to evaluate current tools to conduct Consumer Driven Contract testing (CDC testing o contract testing) for this experiment.

BBVA today signed a global strategic agreement with Telefónica that will allow the bank to optimize its communications, increase the capacity of its technological network and facilitate operations in the “cloud.”

One of the recurrent themes at this year's BBVA Open Summit was the importance of customer centricity. A great example of this was the panel session featuring BBVA’s Global Head of Marketing, Design and Responsible Business, Rob Brown and 11:FS Co-Founder Jason Bates.