BBVA’s Turkish unit consolidates its lead in innovative digital payment solutions by adding a new dimension to card transactions with digital receipts, a first in the Turkish banking sector.

Over 2.9 billion people around the world have never used the internet. Whether through lack of infrastructure or gaps in learning, unequal access to ICTs (also known as the digital divide) is an obstacle to development. We explore what options are available to heal the wound that affects 37% of the world's population.

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.

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.

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.

Atom, the UK's first app-based bank, has raised more than £75m in new equity (around €90m)¹. Together with Toscafund and Infinity Investment Partners, BBVA has led this round, which is still open to other shareholders of the company. BBVA has once again shown its support for the Atom project and team, of which it has been a shareholder since 2015 and which it has supported in all its share capital increases. BBVA is currently the main shareholder, with a 39% holding.

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.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies has gone in this fourteenth edition to Judea Pearl for “bringing a modern foundation to artificial intelligence”. The Professor of Computer Science at the University of California (UCLA), has made contributions that enable AI programs to use two of the key resources we humans use to interpret the world and arrive at decisions: probability and causality.

BBVA has renewed the processors of its Data Processing Centers (DPC) in Spain and Mexico, with the help of IBM, to achieve significant energy and environmental improvements. In the case of its DPC in Tres Cantos (Madrid), a recent study carried out by BBVA has concluded that the installation of the new IBM z15 central processing equipment is already allowing the use of 50% less energy than with the previous data processors and, in a period of five years, the emission of carbon gases will have been reduced by half, a very significant figure when it comes to moving towards a more sustainable model.

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.

The Spanish entrepreneurial ecosystem has grown and matured this year, with the fintech sector leading the way and a considerable boost from investors. While Madrid and Barcelona continue to dominate the national landscape, the Basque Country, Valencia and Malaga have increasingly prominent roles to play, and regions like the Canary Islands and Galicia are working hard to make a name for themselves. A tour of these areas shows the wealth of opportunities for innovation and the diversity of sectors.

BBVA has managed to get its app to learn to read customers’ bills, distinguish their energy costs and calculate their equivalent in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in order to offer personalized advice to save energy. Behind the carbon footprint calculator, which has been operational in Spain and will reach Turkey shortly, is an artificial intelligence system that is still being developed. In 2022, it will add transportation measurements to give an even more accurate picture of each user’s environmental impact.

BBVA’s Swiss franchise has expanded its cryptocurrency custody and trading service, which now allows for ether operations. This cryptocurrency developed by Ethereum is the second most used cryptocurrency after bitcoin, and completes BBVA Switzerland’s pioneering offer.

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.

Greenspark’s technological solutions allow large companies and SMEs to offset their environmental impact by integrating into their websites services to plant trees for each order received, or clean up ocean plastic for each new subscriber to their newsletter. BBVA Anthemis Venture Partnership leads the first round of financing for this British startup.

BBVA and 500 Global have signed an agreement for 500 Global to develop an Intelligence Platform that would support BBVA’s ability to identify new startups, technologies and emerging trends with the potential to impact the future of the most innovative industries, and by extension, the finance sector. The new BBVA-500 Intelligence Platform will attempt to promote new collaborations and pilot projects between startups and the bank.

BBVA comes first in the ranking of the most influential brands in the financial technology conversation on social networks, created by Onalytica. This company, specialized in connecting brands with influencer communities, highlights BBVA for being the first company of reference in the creation and generation of fintech thought leadership content on.

“Four Principles for Realizing Strategy with Innovation” by Nils O. Fonstad, Research Scientist and Jukka Salonen, CISR Industry Research Fellow has been published by The MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research, a research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that focuses on the use of information technology and management in complex organizations. The briefing analyzes the bank’s successful implementation process of its single development agenda (SDA) model.

Working hours that suit the individual, the ability to operate from anywhere in the world, breaking with traditional hierarchical structures and constant renewal to respond to the needs of the market. This is liquid work - a model that puts individual talent at the heart of activities.

Social networks are experiencing an outburst of influencers generating content on financial topics. More than previous generations, millennials (those born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s) and centennials (those born starting in the late 1990s) appreciate when this type of information comes from someone like themselves. But regulators that have started to monitor their activity recommend taking precautions before following their advice and warn of the risks of turning investing into “a videogame.”

BBVA's Chairman called on the entrepreneurial community to “continue to be brave and invest in green technologies” during his participation in the South Summit, where he stressed the need to continue supporting innovation, especially in the field of digitization and sustainability. “We need to decarbonize in 50 years, and that is going to require a lot of investment and innovation in technologies that do not exist today,” insisted the BBVA Chairman at this conference dedicated to startups and whose opening ceremony was presided over by His Majesty the King.