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.

“We have to be as efficient as the newcomers,” BBVA Executive Chairman Francisco González said at an event organized by MIT Technology Review and BBVA in San Francisco, when describing the transformation process underway at BBVA to turn a conventional bank into a digital house. The process will allow BBVA to be part of the future competitive landscape in financial services, that will be formed by “some banks including BBVA, probably some startups and definitely some big digital players,” Francisco González said.

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.

From a small town in Burgos province, the mobile robotics engineering firm ASTI shows that digitization provides an opportunity to restore the fabric of industry.

For decades now, the conceptual terminology of urban planning has been striking. There are smart cities, urbaneering, digital cities, information cities and interconnected cities. These new terms, together with new tools like the internet of things and big data are transforming a debate that began several thousands of years ago in ancient China and the valleys of Mesopotamia. The discussion of the future of cities is far from new, as it entails some of humanity’s oldest concerns. What is unique today – as we’ll see – is not the novelty of the concepts but their potential.