For more than 20 years Garanti BBVA has been investing in technology in order to ensure a personalized and simplified digital experience in every new product or service it offers its customers and clients. In collaboration with Google, the bank recently launched a ‘Universal App Campaign,’ aiming to increase the number of interactions in the Garanti BBVA Mobile app and to encourage customers to use the bank’s digital channels for their banking transactions.

Decision making can be psychologically, emotionally and sometimes even physically exhausting. That’s why all of us have created mental shortcuts, biases, and preferences that help us make decisions. While this can save us time and fatigue, it doesn’t always help us make the best decisions.

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.

Consumers’ sensitive data is increasingly at risk as more businesses ask for personal information as a way to verify digital identity online. But what if there were a way to do that without the risk of compromising that information? Covault is leading a revolution to do just that.

We humans have a history of finding faster, simpler, more efficient ways of doing things. Over time, we’ve sped up every process from building a car to ordering a pizza online.  So it’s really no surprise that we’ve also established thought processes to help us wade through all the information we encounter and make decisions more quickly.

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.

Artificial intelligence systems that are capable of reasoning, creating art or even learning to teach other machines. These are a few examples of what could occur in the future with advances in deep learning. Three experts in the AI field shared their vision, concerns and hopes regarding the development of this technology during the launch of BBVA AI Factory.

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.

In the business world, the CISO or Chief Information Security Officer is the person responsible for ensuring and upgrading information security within the organization. At home, we can apply many of the basic principles that are foundation of the CISO role to protect and preserve our family’s private information. No matter how daunting the task may seem at first, it is really not that hard to achieve this goal without being an expert on the subject.

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.

If Cicero or Quintilianus had known about TED Talks, they probably would have included them in their repertoire of rhetorical devices. Quite possible because, just like the Romans recommended, Ted Talk orators persuade with eloquence.

Earlier this month, BBVA hosted the third edition of Open Summit – this time in Mexico, bringing together business leaders and innovators from across LATAM.

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.

Any company can fall victim to this kind of crime in which criminals trick an employee authorized to give bank payment orders into performing a transaction for them. Financial institutions like BBVA never request sensitive information, such as passwords or personal data, by email or outside of the secure environment on Net Cash and BBVA.es. For organizations, the key to preventing this kind of fraud is to reinforce control systems and  exercise great caution.

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.

Data may have been the key buzzword at the Money 2020 Europe event in Amsterdam last week, but it was its constituent parts that were really vying for attention.

After two years of fast growth, entrepreneurial banking specialist Azlo sets its sights on building a network-affect business community.

Money 2020 Europe is the biggest conference on the continent focused on the future of banking, money and financial services. Over the course of three days in Amsterdam, around 10,000 business leaders, entrepreneurs, start-ups, press and potential customers will be sharing and debating the trends likely to shape the future of the sector.

In an Op-Ed article published in the Financial Times, BBVA Group’s executive chairman Carlos Torres Vila has called on the next European Commission, which will take office in November 2019, to prioritise cross-sector data sharing regulations to fuel the fast growing digital economy.

Global strategic agreement with NetApp enables optimization of data management and enhancement of cloud operations to continue supporting digital transformation.

BBVA’s venture capital business Propel Venture Partners has led the funding round into one of the three finalists of the bank’s Open Talent competition, just a year after the business scooped a top award.

Sixty candidates worked non-stop to develop an analytical model and come up with a business solution based on datasets provided by BBVA. The competition, hosted last week at Ciudad BBVA, was the last phase of a selection process aimed at recruiting new members to enroll in the ‘Young Data Professionals’ program, a BBVA initiative aimed at developing young advanced analytics talent.

At the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) 2019 Global Conference, Garanti BBVA presented their 2018 annual consolidated report, which emphasized how important empathy is to the bank’s corporate culture and how this influences their approach to customers,clients and employees. Sinem Ozonur, BBVA Head of Consolidated Reporting at Garanti BBVA, was the first representative from a Turkish company to take the stage and address some of the more note-worthy topics.

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

BBVA Executive Chairman Carlos Torres Vila today unveiled the book ‘Towards a New Enlightenment? A Transcendent Decade’ in Madrid. The book is the eleventh in a collection sponsored by OpenMind, the non-profit knowledge community created by BBVA. More than 20 authors contributed to this year’s edition, which fosters a broad based discussion about the new philosophical and ethical foundations that need to be established in order to sustain an economy, a society, a culture – and the corresponding regulation – as they adapt to the new scientific and technological contexts.

BBVA Group has developed a platform to facilitate mobile payments across all the countries in its footprint. The platform developed by BBVA connects to Visa and Mastercard directly from each country’s application and provides the data required to process digital transactions from a smartphone.

BBVA held its first Family Cybersecurity Day, an initiative aimed at raising awareness and educating employees and their families about the potential risks derived from the online activities and certain digital habits that are already a part of our daily lives.

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

The Finnish startup is to expand to Ireland, Italy, Belgium, France and the Netherlands as demand for its small business current account service increases. The firm has already reached its 150,000 micro business customers milestone.

Every day, we ask our brains to make decisions, about what to wear, what to order, which shoes to buy, which route to take to work. Some of these decisions are made so automatically, we aren’t even aware we’re making them. Our brains do that on purpose — relying on shortcuts and preferences — to avoid the continuous ongoing stress of making the same decisions again and again.

This new payment method replaces sensitive debit or credit card data with a unique identification code called a ‘token,’ which is used during a digital transaction. Online transactions are therefore more secure because the customer’s actual card data no longer needs to be provided. BBVA has already committed to helping its customers adopt this new payment approach.

Garanti Bank provides its SME clients a dedicated in-branch customer relationship manager who support clients in their banking needs. Now, these clients have access to a new service: Central Customer Service (Merkezi Müşteri Hizmetleri, or MHT). This new structure aims to provide clients a faster response to queries and transactions when the volume of requests is high

There is no doubt that big data is transforming the financial industry, helping it overcome the challenges of today’s society. Nonetheless, given the fact that one of its fundamental objectives is to obtain data — albeit to improve customer satisfaction —  it still causes some people to have misgivings because it is perceived as an intrusion of their privacy.

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.”

Forbes magazine has included BBVA as one of the ‘Blockchain 50,’ a list that recognizes the leaders in the use and development of this exponential technology. The U.S. publication specifically focused on BBVA’s efforts in the area of blockchain-powered syndicated loans, which are used by the bank to further transparency, security, and efficiency throughout its business processes.

Each year Propel Venture Partners holds an annual summit for the businesses it invests into through it’s single limited partner, BBVA. The event in Silicon Valley is a chance for updates, shared learnings, introductions and to discuss the kind of technology and drivers that will shape the sector in the coming years.