2019 has seen the first 5G networks rolled out and the first achievements in quantum computing, as well as the establishment of various financial initiatives using blockchain. These three technologies will mark a before and after in the banking sector in the years to come.

As part of Garanti BBVA’s goal to enhance customer experience on the go, the bank is now offering customer service on a corporate WhatsApp account. The new WhatsApp service allows customers to resolve their problems quickly and get detailed information on the bank’s products and services  – all on a channel they already use on a daily basis.

In this second article, BBVA experts in various fields give their views on the changes and breakthroughs that happened during 2019, and the ones we will see in the technological banking landscape in 2020.

Garanti BBVA Executive Vice President Didem Dinçer Başer joined the Women in Technology (Wtech) Association at their inaugural event, ‘Human Diversity in Technology.’ The Wtech Association aims to increase the number of women in technology by helping them fulfill their potential and advocating for equal opportunities. Didem Dinçer Başer participated in a panel entitled ‘Future with Technology’ where she discussed the future of digital banking and ever-changing customer expectations.

The role technology plays in people’s lives –both personal and business– is continually growing. As a bank, BBVA committed to transforming itself digitally long before the start of the last decade, understanding that technology was going to have a huge impact on how the industry operates. In this article, BBVA experts in various fields give their view on the changes that 2020 will see in the technological landscape.

One of the biggest challenges in advanced analytics is developing mechanisms to determine how reliable the decisions made by algorithms are. Now, research by BBVA’s Artificial Intelligence Factory is proposing a new method to make machine learning models capable of expressing the uncertainty in their predictions in a clearer manner. It’s an exploratory approach to make artificial intelligence more transparent, measure the reliability of its predictions and  fine tune the accuracy of its results.

The past 12-months have seen significant evolutions in the way BBVA uses technology to provide banking products and services. This is a selection of this year’s BBVA digital transformation highlights.

Garanti BBVA is partnering with BELBİM Elektronik Para ve Ödeme Hizmetleri A.Ş., to go the extra mile when it comes to innovation. Garanti BBVA’s  mobile app can now be used to refill Istanbul travel cards, allowing customers to move around the city without worrying about the balance on their card.

The new global partnership will enable BBVA to optimize data storage and processing capabilities that drive its commitment towards innovation in financial services.

Google claims that its quantum computer has been able to perform a calculation in a matter of seconds, a task that would take a traditional computer thousands of years. Even though quantum processors currently only handle simple problems, they are expected to have a significant impact on the future of the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and banking industries.

Will connected cars need their own bank account? The BBVA New Digital Businesses (NDB) unit is working to anticipate the opportunities and challenges that will arise in the financial industry when the Internet of Things (IoT) makes it possible to manage transactions directly among objects, people and organizations.

Ride sharing giant Uber yesterday announced it was launching a new venture, Uber Money, becoming the latest big tech business to move deeper into financial services.

BBVA’s Turkish bank recently participated in the Mobile Market Association’s Impact Istanbul event. Executive Vice President Didem Dinçer Başer represented the bank at the conference, where she discussed the transformational role of mobile technology and mobile marketing in the finance sector.

The world of banking is continuing to undergo a paradigm shift in terms of the way it operates and the products and services it delivers. BBVA’s Global Head of New Digital Businesses (NDB), Ian Ormerod, outlines the strategies NDB enacts to build the future of banking, and how uncertainty is a key driver for its growth.

The roll-out of networks with speeds far superior to 4G will improve customer experience and allow for real time information processing, making communications more secure.

According to a KPMG report, payments will retain its position as the most significant area for fintech investment in the coming years. Regtech, cybersecurity, wealthtech and proptech are other sectors on the rise. These are areas of innovation and development that the BBVA Open Talent team is also seeing, as part of the around 800 entries to this year’s BBVA Open Talent Competition, the world’s biggest fintech competition.

Big data is having a huge impact on the business world, and consequently it is becoming an integral part of corporate DNA. Aware of the benefits derived from this technology, businesses have resolved to recruit professionals who can manage and analyze vast quantities of data. The goal is to offer more personalized solutions to customers.

Is it possible to show that something is true without revealing the data that proves it? This is what ‘Zero Knowledge Proof’ technology proposes, a technique which employs cryptographic algorithms so that various parties can verify the veracity of an item of information without sharing the data that compose it.

Soccer fandom is sweeping the nation, from the World Cup victory by the U.S. Women’s National Team to thrilling matches in Major League Soccer and the National Women’s Soccer League to the thousands of fans who pack pubs and bars to watch matches from around the world every weekend. But in sports, the game itself is no longer all that attracts fans to the arena. Tech-savvy millennials expect an “Instagrammable,” in-stadium experience, or else they’ll stay back and watch at home. Recognizing the demands of its growing fan base, Major League Soccer’s Houston Dynamo and the National Women’s Soccer League’s Houston Dash selected Extreme Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: EXTR) Smart OmniEdge™ solution to provide high-density, professional-grade Wi-Fi connectivity in its home field, BBVA Stadium. The free fan Wi-Fi experience is presented by BBVA USA.

Experts in telecommunications, industrial engineering, and IT have developed the artificial intelligence that gives Google Assistant, Siri, and Bixby their voices. The most common techniques used to generate responses are based on templates that contain changing parameters.

Garanti BBVA’s data center, formerly located in Istanbul’s Güneşli district, has moved to an Uptime Institute Tier IV certified building in Pendik, also in Istanbul.

Some organizations foment innovation in the contexts that dictate the present. But innovation is intimately tied to the future and variations of the future. Thus, inspiring creativity is also offering ideas about what is possible and forthcoming. Perhaps this is the key to true realism.

Garanti BBVA’s Mobile app is a good example of how the bank is making its customers’ lives easier. All these efforts contribute to the bank’s customer-centric focus by ensuring that its tailor-made services are available – any time and any place – to both its individual and corporate customers.

Antonio Herráiz is a firm believer in innovation focused on results, especially if it generates a positive impact for people. Thanks to him, more than 7,000 of the Group’s employees across the globe have attended BBVA’s Process Academy.

BBVA and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) have signed a collaboration agreement to jointly explore the applications of quantum technologies in the financial sector.

In the formal launch event of BBVA’s new global development center specializing in artificial intelligence, the leaders of the three areas that have worked together to create it – Data, Engineering and Client Solutions – shared with the team their vision and goals to materialize the impact of this technology across the organization.

BBVA will today launch a new program designed to foster even greater success among the fintech start-up ecosystem it engages with.

AI Factory is the global development center where BBVA builds the artificial intelligence capabilities that power both its customer solutions – for both the retail and corporate segments – and the Group’s streamlined internal processes. The new structure brings together, under the same roof, a cross-disciplinary team consisting of data scientists, teams from the Engineering area, and representatives from other business areas.

BBVA USA launched its real time ARP and PositivePay products last year in a milestone that was both ground-breaking and game-changing.

BBVA and Dufry have launched the first WeChat Pay facilities in Spain, in the travel retail operator’s World Duty Free stores at the Adolfo Suarez Madrid-Barajas airport, in a dedicated bid to make Chinese tourists feel more welcome while on tour.

A new strategy and narrower focus will help BBVA Open Innovation build on its 2018 successes.

Applications for BBVA Open Talent 2019 — the biggest fintech startup competition in the world — are open until 5 July 2019.

Carlos Torres Vila studied at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is where he gave his first interview since becoming BBVA’s Executive Chairman. He was in Boston to present OpenMind’s new book, ‘Towards a New Enlightenment? A Transcendent Decade’ and sat down with the Spanish newspaper, ‘El Mundo,’ to discuss the explosion of technology in the banking industry. He believes data is fundamental: “It is crucial that the data revolution is universal. The most vulnerable in society cannot be left behind.”

At an event organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, BBVA’s Group executive chairman presented Openmind’s new book, ‘Towards a New Enlightenment? A Transcendent Decade‘. Carlos Torres Vila and two contributing authors, Joanna Bryson and Sandy Pentland, discussed the implications of big data and artificial intelligence in the current technological context and its role in the so-called fourth industrial revolution.

BBVA is one of the founding members of the International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA), which was officially launched today in Brussels.  Carlos Kuchkovsky, CTO of New Digital Businesses at BBVA, represents the only Spanish company on the new association’s ten-member Board.

In line with its digital transformation strategy, BBVA has launched a new form of corporate loan, the digital facility (D-Loan), and signed the first ever financing of this kind with Olam International, a leading food and agri-business company headquartered and listed in Singapore. As provider of this innovative solution, BBVA acted as digital advisor and coordinator under the new USD 350 million revolving credit facility. BBVA was also the facility agent for the other 6 banks that participate in the financing.

Digital loans (or D-loans) are a type of corporate bank financing (which could also come in the form of credit facilities) for which the price is linked to the company’s degree of digitization. The digital maturity level is determined annually by specialized independent consulting firms after a thorough analysis. If the company improves its level of digitization, the conditions of the bank financing also improve. By doing so, the company aligns its financial instruments with its corporate strategy, and has a financial incentive to improve its degree of digitization and accelerate its digital transformation over time.

NASA’s Space Apps Challenge, one of the world’s most popular hackathons, has, once again, awarded a group of Spaniards, in this case the time behind ‘Galaxy Quest.’ The project helps processing real data collected by the Hubble telescope through a ‘gamification’ process.  But not only that:  It is the first step in developing an artificial neural network using these data, and a new communications channel between NASA and users.  José Luis Martín-Oar, service designer at BBVA and one of the team’s members, tells us everything about the project.

Garanti Bank has launched a new series of training seminars for entrepreneurs. The Garanti Partners Meetup series supports Turkey’s ecosystem of entrepreneurs by providing master classes on relevant topics.

eKampüs, the Teachers Academy Foundation’s (ÖRAV) distance education platform has been restructured with updated content as part of the foundation’s digital transformation.

The European Commission (EC) is convening institutions, businesses, and regulators today and tomorrow in BBVA’s headquarters in Madrid with the aim of promoting security and privacy measures that will stimulate greater use of cloud services and the free flow of data in Europe’s digital single market (DSM). BBVA is hosting the event and is an active member of the EC working group, which is seeking to standardize security certification for cloud providers and establish a code of conduct that will facilitate data portability and the ability to switch providers.

Every parent has been in this position: the baby cries and cries, and we don’t know why. Is it hungry? Is it tired? Ana Laguna, data scientist at BBVA Data & Analytics, asked herself the same questions when her first child was born. Ana looked for an app that would help her understand why her baby was crying.  But she didn’t have any luck. Then she thought she could translate her baby’s crying and understand what it needed any time by using the artificial intelligence techniques that she uses everyday at work.

Between 2018 and 2022, the business springing up around technologies blending the real and virtual worlds is expected to grow 700%.

BBVA has been named by digital banking consultants 11:FS as one of the world’s best digital providers – for the second year in a row.

Creating global products is one of the keys to BBVA’s transformation and represents one of its main challenges to becoming a digital company. The goal is to develop solutions that incorporate the Group’s best practices and whose components can be reused. In doing so, the bank is more efficient, can go to market more quickly, and creates a single user experience across the bank’s operating countries.

In an article, Forbes praises BBVA’s digital strategy and technological deployment, as well as the AI-powered apps that the bank is already using to deliver better solutions to its customers.

Financial authorities will soon begin an unprecedented countdown. In 2018, fintech became an entrenched priority for the financial sector, and a multitude of strategies emerged to address the challenges of digitization. In 2019, financial authorities should take action and implement a global approach to the challenges of the new era. This is the conclusion detailed in BBVA Research’s latest report, ‘Financial Regulation Outlook 1Q19’.