Programming

The Mercury library stores the code that BBVA's data scientists reuse to develop analytical models embedded in a range of financial products. In line with the open source philosophy, the bank has published Mercury on Github, a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration. This means other programmers will be able to use Mercury code in their work, which will help drive fintech innovation and further evolve the library with contributions from the community.

Carlos Torres Vila attended one of the activities of the Code.org programming course for children of BBVA employees. The BBVA Chair shared a day with 146 boys and girls between 5 and 13 years of age to promote programming training among young people.

The strategic alliance between the two entities has enabled the integration of Google Cloud into BBVA's technology platform. This collaboration is helping the bank reduce the time it takes to launch digital products, better detect cyber threats, make sustainability one of its core capabilities, and compete with digital fintechs.

The teams will have 40 uninterrupted hours to solve one of the 12 programming challenges posed by BBVA.

Loners and freaks who are addicted to video games, love junk food, and inhabit basements: the computer programmer stereotype, propagated by the silver screen, is a serious setback when it comes to attracting talent into this field. And it is much worse when it comes to attracting female talent. In Spain in 2017, the rate of women between 20 and 29 years old, graduating  in science, mathematics, information technology, or engineering per 1,000 inhabitants was 13.1 percent.  The scarcity of female talent in this field can also be witnessed at hackathons, but there's good news: women are willing to put an end to these clichés.

A group of 12 leading regional and digital financial institutions have joined together as investors and members in KY3P®, a company dedicated to working with the financial industry to standardize best practices for managing third-party risk and optimizing the processes by which financial institutions assess and monitor inherent risk in engaging suppliers and entering into third-party relationships.

More and more initiatives allow SMEs to use artificial intelligence without the need for programmers. Giants like Baidu and Google, as well as smaller companies like Lobe, are presenting their products.

The advantages are many. This doesn't mean we have to be specialists in computer science. Programming languages are what allow machines to be given instructions, and what makes them, more or less, intelligent. So, the more we know about these processes, the better we understand how the world today functions. We will also be better protected against urban myths and fake news. For example, if we knew how the algorithms that protect our bank accounts work, we would be leery of the urban myth that says if we enter our pin backwards in the ATM, the bank immediately notifies the police.

Interactive fairy tales, being in outer space or a radical remake of the classic game Tetris. These are some of the dream plays to take your first steps in this new audiovisual language.

What happens when you choose a restaurant on the Internet? Or when you want to buy a book? Or find a song? Or get hooked on a new series?  BBVA Data & Analytics in a new item for dissemination explains how the different recommendation systems used by Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify work and how they will extend beyond the consumer and entertainment sectors.

At BBVA Labs, we have been using Akka Actors in different projects for a long time due to its inherent computation distribution capabilities in high load scenarios, using actors as stateless or stateful units of execution that send messages among them in an asynchronous fashion.

In this post, we will cover some of the weak points of working with untyped classic actors and we will show what are the benefits that Akka Typed brings to the scene. Finally, we will present a brief description of session types and the Process DSL API created by Dr. Roland Kuhn. All examples are written using the Scala API.

The head of the BBVA Data & Analytics’ Edge team, José Antonio Rodríguez-Serrano, who coordinates the innovation area in BBVA's center of excellence in data science, shares his insights into five key questions to understand the implications of this exponential technology in different economical sectors and spheres of society.

The widespread use of mobile devices on a day-to-day basis brings with it the risk of very personal information such as bank details, photographs, messages, contacts and emails and a long list of private details falling into unwanted hands.

‘Blockchain’ is still at level 0 in the video game industry, but it has a promising future.

As we have seen in previous articles, the intelligent use of data, with the right talent and the pertinent business strategies for applying creative solutions, can provide insights that help solve a whole gamut of problems and take on board new opportunities. Data places within our grasp an enhanced decision-making ability and a deeper understanding of our clients and what they need. But as in the case of any other tool, these new skills can be put to positive or not so positive use, whether intentionally or not.

We inferred as much in the title to the first article of this series: to key to realizing all the opportunities of this new technological era, lies in these three factors: raw material—data—and the other two are human factors—intelligence and innovation.

Concepts such as big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence and data science are increasingly at the center of the debate about the digital revolution. But why is everyone talking about them? Do we really understand these concepts, or the implications they have on our evolution as a society?

The new technologies, and their presence in everyday life, are radically changing the way we look at entertainment, social relationships and work. They have also created new professions that do not yet have a set educational pathway, such as videogame developer.

Today, a large majority of modern apps or services are RESTful APIs and use API definitions to facilitate communications between them, as it saves us from having to worry about the language and the underlying implementation of the remaining components. APIs make even more sense in microservice or serverless architectures with dozens or hundreds of mutually interacting microservices/functions.

The APIfication phenomenon is by no means restricted to the banking sector. At the API Forum held this week in Madrid, insurance and entertainment companies participated, together with BBVA, to discuss the keys to designing APIs capable of attracting developers.

Car sharing and driverless cars are shaking the very foundations of the automobile industry. Will technology make car ownership obsolete?

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.

These new technological tools have the potential to improve all kinds of economic exchanges and open the door to new ways of doing business that today are unimaginable.

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

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.

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.

Esri, a global leader in Geographic Information Systems and BBVA API Market, have rolled out a collaboration project to embed BBVA's 'API PayStats' in Esri’s platform. The aim is to enable companies and public institutions to make business decisions based on customers’ actual commercial behavior.