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.

In general, businesses use the customer data they access for internal purposes, creating value-added services. Yet, there is greater potential for society as a whole beyond corporate “closed doors.” Public-private sector collaboration using data sources for external initiatives can produce significant benefits. For example, a door could be open that would facilitate the use of data to help fulfill the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

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.

Ricardo Forcano, BBVA’s Global Head of Engineering and Organization, participated in the Association for the Advancement of Management’s (APD in Spanish) session on Agile Organizations, where he presented how BBVA is transforming its organization and work methods. “It’s a constant learning process,” Forcano said, referring to BBVA’s efforts to incorporate  the agile methodology across all of its central areas. As a result, the bank is able to provide its customers new solutions more effectively.

In recent months, BBVA Next Technologies has devoted some effort into researching tools and techniques for interpreting machine learning models. These techniques are very useful to understand the predictions of a model (or make others understand them), to extract business insights from a model that has managed to capture the underlying patterns of customers interest, and to debug models in order to ensure they make the right decisions for the right reasons.

In this article we will explain how we have applied these techniques to avoid deploying flawed models into production that seemed totally correct a priori according to standard validation methods.

Garanti continues to bring innovative solutions to the Turkish banking sector with SWIFT GPI, a new standard that provides significant improvements to the handling of international payments. Foreign currency transactions made to both domestic and foreign banks via Garanti Bank can now be easily tracked with SWIFT’s ‘Tracking Report’ feature, which has been integrated into Garanti Online Banking.

The branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on teaching machines how to see is becoming increasingly sophisticated. It is already better than humans at telling one person from another. At BBVA’s headquarters, this technology is already being used to allow users to pay for their meals at Ciudad BBVA’s restaurants. But, how does it work?

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.

As technological innovation continues, customer expectations evolve at a similarly rapid pace.  In navigating this dynamic landscape, financial institutions are increasingly seeking assistance from outside, third party providers, a strategy that itself poses inherent risks, like cybersecurity challenges and the potential for digital-related fraud.  Greater attention and scrutiny from regulators naturally results from this developing risk paradigm.

BBVA and Telefónica have signed a strategic agreement that designates the operator as the single telecommunications service provider for the bank and its employees in Spain. The alliance will allow BBVA to optimize its communications systems, increase the capacity of its technology network, and extend its adoption of cloud computing, providing a distinctive advantage to the business’ needs.

Designers around the world working for the BBVA Group now have a pioneering new tool at their disposal. The platform allows designers to reuse parts in order to create homogenous digital banking experiences across all of the countries where the bank has a presence. BBVA, with presence in 30 countries, is the first bank to launch a platform like this on such an international scale and in multiple continents.

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.

The ways in which businesses use data to deliver on their strategies is almost as varied as the sources of data themselves. This was one of the key messages from last week’s Domopalooza event held in Salt Lake City in Utah.

Training employees in analytical techniques has become a top priority for companies seeking to make the most out of their data.

BBVA’s San Francisco based Propel Venture Partners unit has announced it is to support a new round of funding into Ease – an HR software solution for small and medium sized businesses from the U.S.

More customers now join BBVA via its award winning app in Spain than they do via other digital channels, the bank has revealed in the latest update to its digital transformation programme.

Garanti Bank’s Digital Car Loans took home the bronze medal in the Best Sales Solutions category at the 2019 Stevie Awards. The new product allows customers to calculate payment plan options when purchasing a vehicle – part of the bank’s efforts to make life easier for their customers.

BBVA’s Global Head of Client Solutions, Derek White, told a conference in the Spanish capital Madrid this morning that it was crucial the customers win ‘The Game of Data’.

In 2019, the Business 20 (B20) – considered to be the private sector’s voice of the G20 – is seeking to showcase innovative projects that contribute to the fulfillment of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To this end, business members of this advisory body to the G20 have submitted proposals for projects that make a significant social impact. BBVA is the only Spanish bank whose five project submissions are among those selected.

BBVA is in the midst of its transformation process, and the creation of global products is one of the key pillars in its strategy to become a fully digital business. Early on the bank recognized the opportunity afforded by global product development and the upshot represented by being able to share best practices between countries. There are already measurable examples in different countries like Mexico, Spain, and Turkey, which corroborate the effectiveness of this strategy and its ensuing projects.

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

In its most recent issue, The Fintech Magazine examines some of BBVA’s most recent technology advances, such as payments powered by facial recognition and the use of artificial intelligence in its mobile banking application.  The magazine also outlines the core of the bank’s digital strategy and describes how BBVA is taking steps to fulfill its vision of automated banking in the future.

The sidecar pattern shows itself as a very powerful tool in the new world of containers and can be found in several use cases. In this post we focus in analyzing some of the most interesting use cases from an IT security perspective.

The heart of the scrum work methodology is the sprint. The sprint is a miniproject nomore than one month (very short execution cycles – from one to four weeks), aimed atincreasing in value in the product we are building. All sprints have a definition andplanning that will help achieve the goals set.

BBVA in Switzerland has taken another step forward in the digital transformation of private banking with the launch of its new website. The new site, www.bbva.ch, offers customers an innovative navigation experience and adapts to the bank’s evolving activity in the Swiss country.

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.