BBVA CEO Onur Genç stated that “BBVA has a competitive advantage” in the context of digital acceleration resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. “Digitization boosts our business,” he said during his presentation at the 17th Banking Industry Meeting organized by IESE in Madrid. In March 2022, BBVA added 90,000 new customers in Spain - the largest monthly figures in its history. Over half (52.25 percent) of these customers reached the bank through digital channels.

BBVA will invest a total of 15 million euros in Leadwind, a venture capital fund managed by K Fund. In this first phase, the fund will raise 140 million euros to support technology companies in Spain, Portugal and Latin America.

The boom in cryptocurrencies, particularly in regions like Latin America, has lead numerous governments to create legislation to take advantage of the benefits and mitigate the risks. And they are not the only new alternative to cash - several central banks, including the European Central Bank, are looking into the possibility of issuing their own digital currencies. During a BBVA Open Talks event, the speakers debated how these changes will define the future of money.

Truora has raised $15 million in a series A funding round led by Propel, the fund that manages BBVA’s fintech investments, and Acel - one of the main investors in technology and the Internet. This new injection of capital will allow Truora to reinforce its expansion in Mexico with its solution to verify users through WhatsApp.

The world of medicine is experiencing an unprecedented transformation. The pandemic has highlighted the importance of digitisation and a number of different technologies are making an impression on this field, with solutions to improve both diagnosis and treatment. On the occasion of World Health Day, we're taking a close look at this wave of entrepreneurship to find out which trends and advances are leading the way in this sector.

The BBVA and Anthemis partnership led the first pre-seed funding for Wiserentr with an investment of one million euros. The Spanish startup raised a total of €1.6 million in the funding round, in which Shard Capital also participated. Its novel service reinvents the way to access high-end technology, as users pay a fixed fee throughout the time they use the electronic device. Once the set rental time has ended, it can be returned or purchased to use indefinitely.

Garanti BBVA Asset Management, Turkey's first portfolio management company, continues to offer innovative solutions to its investors. In this context, the company recently created the "Garanti Asset Management Metaverse and New Technologies Variable Fund (MET)", the first fund in Turkey to focus on metaverse - the new virtual and real-world network that is expected to replace the internet in the future.

In recent years, the term proptech (technology applied to property) has become popular across the various strands of the housing market. The emergence of startups using tech tools like big data and artificial intelligence, as well as the inevitable digitisation of countless traditional companies due to the Coronavirus crisis, has laid the foundations for this sector to be reinvented.

Promoting open banking with APIs, retaining digital customers with artificial intelligence and enhancing traceability in logistics with blockchain are the technological solutions devised by five startups that have run pilots with BBVA Open Innovation. Now they are identifying their next steps to tackle the challenges ahead.

BBVA will create 200 jobs in two years, with the launch of two technology centers in Bilbao. These centers will have specialized profiles such as computer, telecommunications, systems and industrial engineers, as well as mathematicians.

Technology will continue to redouble the capacity of digital businesses in 2022 and will bring opportunities to the world to liberalise data, mitigate climate change, look after people's health, advance education and even create parallel universes.

BBVA’s Turkish franchise has integrated the country's code standards into all of its mobile channels, ATMs and POS devices.

Taking a leading role in the sector with its innovative solutions in digital banking, Garanti BBVA has implemented the Document Upload function for their corporate customers where they can add their financial data from Corporate Internet Banking.

A team of university students from Mexico developed an app in just three days to meet customers' needs in terms of finances, entertainment, shopping and transport. Thanks to their business acumen and the use of artificial intelligence and QR code payments, they were able to win the 2021 BBVA Hackathon, which brought together 752 participants from different countries virtually.

Decarbonizing business activity is essential to drive a new industrial revolution that meets climate change objectives. Companies need to leverage technological innovation to place sustainability at the center of their growth strategy, and financial institutions are key players in accompanying them in this transition. Javier Rodríguez Soler, Head of Global Sustainability at BBVA, explained some of the key issues in this regard at the latest Money20/20 meeting held in Las Vegas (USA).

Some of the countries in which, BBVA Open Innovation, such as Peru, Spain and Colombia, will participate in BBVA Hackathon 2021, which is organized by BBVA Mexico. The goal is to support the digital transformation of financial services through challenges posed by business units, as well as a global  ecosystem of entrepreneurs and developers.

We cannot confidently predict the future, but we can build it. Future studies or research in futurology are one of the best tools to guide our personal projects and wishes, as well as to design the strategy for the coming years of our company or startup and therefore succeed with innovation.

BBVA's state-of-the-art data processing centers (DPCs) hold the most prestigious certifications in the world in terms of design, construction and operational sustainability. This ensures that the Group's operations are maintained in the face of possible contingencies, offering the best service to its customers under virtually any circumstances.

The coronavirus crisis has made us more aware of how vulnerable we are to unforeseen events. As a result, in the new social context the insurance industry and insurtechs have been driven to strengthen their customer focus, digitisation, health insurance and microinsurance, with innovation at the fore.

The BBVA in Spain app is celebrating its 10th anniversary as a key element in the bank’s commitment to lead the digitalization of banking in the country. Since 2011, the app has adapted its functionalities to the times and needs of its customers, at first by allowing them to operate remotely with ease and total security, and over the years with the deployment of a wide range of personalized tools to help them make decisions about their personal finances.

Thanks to a solution developed by the Society for Worldwide Interbank and Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), an online purchase payment from another country or service charges provided by an SME to an international client can be made faster. BBVA is the only Spanish bank to participate in the launch of SWIFT Go and has successfully carried out its first pilot testing of the system as well.

BBVA, which first invested in the fintech in 2018, participated in a new capital increase, part of which was used to fund the acquisition of payments specialist Contis. The new funding round will allow Solarisbank, which recently launched operations in Spain, France and Italy to expedite growth in the embedded finance market.

eSports is one of the digital industries that has grown the most during the COVID-19 pandemic. In May 2021, more than nine million users watched around 2.3 billion hours of gameplay on the streaming platform Twitch alone, which in the first quarter of the year reached a historic 6.3 billion hours watched, doubling the viewing figures of the same quarter in 2020. It is estimated that by 2022 eSports will have global audiences of more than 600 million followers. Streamers are looking to offer these audiences unique new experiences that go beyond gaming and even leap from the virtual to the physical realm.

After the incidents of the previous months (SolarWinds, Codecov,...) it is becoming more evident that it is necessary to have a strong inventory and control over the components with which we build our software, as well as to strengthen the process used to build 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.

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.

BBVA´s CEO was invited to speak at the third edition of an annual meeting organized by the students of the Koç School in Istanbul. The event analyzed opportunities in fintech as well as technology and digitization´s contribution to the banking sector.

BBVA and U.S. based startup Zapata Computing have just released the results of a research project into the use of quantum algorithms applied to the Monte Carlo method, which allows predicting the evolution of different variables under random conditions.  Despite its potential, the use of this technology for achieving a more efficient way of calculating prices of derivative products and making valuation adjustments will still require further developments in the available hardware.

The BBVA Turkish unit joins a club of only 16 data centers worldwide with the highest certification.