The Banker, a magazine part of the Financial Times group, recognized BBVA at its annual awards as the Best Bank in Europe for Innovation in Digital Banking. The magazine gave this award to BBVA for being the first bank to allow its business customers to measure their carbon footprint, helping customers make the best decisions to improve their financial health and the bitcoin trading and custody service launched in Switzerland for private banking customers.

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.

Embedded finance allows you to pay for a purchase online without entering bank details or instantly take out a consumer loan on digital platforms outside banks, among many other options. This Bank-as-a-Service model, which allows the integration of financial services via APIs, moved $22.5 billion in 2020, a figure that will increase tenfold in the next four years.

StepEx has raised £1.1 million in pre-initial funding, with the venture studio BBVA Anthemis Venture Partnership being the lead investor. This startup from the UK offers an alternative system of student finance based on the estimation of their future income, to democratize access to postgraduate qualifications.

No venture fund can reveal all its secrets, is the first thing Propel says when asked how it selects the startups in which it wants to invest. But it does recognize that there are elements that are as clear a sign as any to detect a great company.

With more than 40 companies in its portfolio, six of them considered unicorns (valued above $1 billion) and two listed on the public stock markets, Propel has become a corporate venture capital benchmark since it was founded five years ago. The book 'Transactional to Transformational - How Banks Innovate', recently published by Wiley, recounts how BBVA opted to create an independently managed fund in order to approach the most promising fintech.

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.

BBVA experts recommend that SMEs should digitize, become more technified, and increase their training to adapt to the new times in order to get onboard the sustainability train and make progress in their recovery.

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.

“Real-time measurement of economic activity is a necessity in these times,” said Tomasa Rodrigo during the traditional summer course at Menéndez Pelayo International University (Santander), organized by the Spanish Association of Economic Information Journalists (APIE), with BBVA's collaboration and sponsorship.

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.

After six months of testing with a selected group of users, BBVA Switzerland makes its first crypto-asset trading and custody service available to all its private banking clients.

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.

In the last six years, BBVA’s original team of less than ten designers has bloomed into a community of more than 500. This year the bank earned a special mention at the Spanish National Design Awards. In the meantime, design became a strategic driver of its transformation process, allowing customers to play a leading role by determining the design of its products. BBVA is facing the future trying to scale up its products by globally with efficiency, integrating data into design and exploring new user experience features, such as voice-enabled navigation.

In 2007 BBVA set off on its transformation journey with the aim of servicing customers through digital channels, making DIY capabilities the cornerstone of our strategy. As a result we achieved exponential trends in sales through digital channels, while customer experience was improved. Now, the bank is immersed in a new stage, focusing on growing our customer base, leveraging on our digital channels and those of third parties. Moreover, it already faces the next challenge: provide proactive and personalized advice to our clients, supported by technology and data.

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 strengthens its offering for multinational companies with BBVA Pivot. Behind the renewal of its global treasury services lies a strategy to conquer a space that still offers great potential for growth. "We want to double the number of corporate clients that have implemented and operate with BBVA Pivot," says Javier Balbin, Global Head of Enterprise Solutions at BBVA.

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.

Luisa Gómez Bravo, Global Head of BBVA Corporate & Investment Banking, has participated in a panel discussion on the recovery of the global banking sector after COVID-19 as part of the "Female Leaders in Finance" conference. This financial news conference, with a focus on female talent in the industry, was organized by HSBC Bank.

José Luis Elechiguerra, a chemical engineer, born in Mexico and with more than 12 years of experience at BBVA, recently took on the role of the Global Head of Engineering and Organization at the BBVA Group.

Recently arrived from BBVA USA where he was in charge of the Client Solutions area, Elechiguerra has accepted the responsibility of being the technological enabler for the bank’s strategy. The way he sees it, without technology it is impossible to talk about sustainability, or helping customers make the best financial decisions, or any other objective set by the BBVA Group. His greatest challenges include consolidating the global application development platform, continuing to explore the potential of cloud computing, helping to make data available to be a smarter bank, and further developing the agile work model so that it expands across the entire organization.

All of this, while continuing to watch the major digital competitors and fintech companies in the rearview mirror - from whom he has learned that banks must be faster in responding to customers’ new demands, as Elechiguerra explains in this interview.

Atom bank, has confirmed that its £40m raise will be led by Toscafund Asset Management LLP and BBVA. As the bank heads towards profitability, the £40m raise includes an offer to participate for qualifying shareholders in new ‘A’ class shares in Atom priced at 60 pence.

BBVA USA was recently honored by IDG’s CIO as a U.S. 2021 CIO 100 award winner for its efforts, that took place exactly one year ago this week, in creating an online portal for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

Artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data are transforming the traditional application of tech in the world of marketing. With these tools, startups and SMEs are able to reach a more specific audience for their products at a lower cost than traditional advertising.

Spain has set itself the challenge of becoming an attractive country for emerging companies through the Strategy for Spain as an Entrepreneurial Nation. The purpose of the strategy is to promote and boost their formation and development through four milestones: investment, talent, scalability and public sector support for entrepreneurship.

The agile work methodology, new skills that teams look for or the recent inclusion of diversity as a strategic business priority are some of the ways in which BBVA’s human team has changed over the past few years. Paloma Tejada, head of Talent and Culture, Agile and Communications, at Client Solutions, BBVA, spoke about all of them in a conversation with Matthew Gamser, CEO of the SME Finance Forum.

Generation Z expects a financial model that meets their needs in terms of digitalisation, immediacy and respect for the environment. Born at the heart of the digital age, they expect services that live up to their requirements for transparency and constant attention.

We tested OpenAI’s GPT-3 (one of the largest Artificial Intelligence (AI) language models ever created) on ten Spanish customer conversations about banking. Without any previous customization, re-training or transfer learning whatsoever, we asked it to generate summaries that would be useful to any bank agent who joins (or retakes) the conversation.

BBVA and Google Cloud today announced a new strategic partnership to transform the bank’s security strategy by optimizing and improving its security infrastructure. As part of this global agreement, BBVA will collaborate with Google Cloud in the development of groundbreaking new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models to predict and prevent cyberattacks against its banking infrastructure, providing a more secure experience for the bank and its customers.

Nearly 2.5 million people chose digital channels to become BBVA customers in 2020. The figure represents 33.3 percent of total new customers achieved throughout the Group via individual channels (offices, app, web, ATMs ...) and represents a 56 percent jump with respect to new users gained digitally in 2019.

The telecommunications company Orange has become the first operator in Spain to incorporate Bizum into its means of payment. BBVA was the institution that provided the contractual and technological framework to make this possible. As of this week, all Orange customers of the Orange, Jazztel and Amena brands, regardless of their banks, will be able to carry out certain transactions with this payment method that´s faster than a card and that complies with PSD2 requirements.

BBVA plans to invest as much as $150 million in new capital to support Propel, bringing its total commitment to over $400 million, including its previous investment in 2016. The announcement builds on the initial successful relationship established five years ago, which has enabled Propel to partner with leading innovators such as Coinbase, DocuSign, Hippo, Guideline, and Neon.

Garanti BBVA launches ‘Garanti Portföy Temiz Enerji Karma Fon’, an innovative fund that invests in capital market instruments tied to Turkish and international companies in the sector of clean, renewable and alternative energy technologies.

This year, the Davos Forum will be celebrating its most special and challenging edition, in the midst of the ongoing COVID pandemic. For this reason, the 51st edition of the World Economic Forum (World Economic Forum, WEF) will be held in two phases: An virtual one in January and another one, face-to-face, in August. The summit will convene politicians, businessmen and representatives of social and cultural organizations at a crucial time for the world, under the tagline 'The Great Reset'.

The emergence of technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain has exponentially multiplied the volume of data used, putting current computer systems to the test. Despite the fact that the arrival of 5G promises an improvement in these limitations, it is not enough to respond to the performance demands of this latest generation technology. An alternative to this is edge computing.

Central bank-backed digital currencies, such as the potential digital euro and digital yuan, may become a reality in the coming years. Unlike cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, these currencies promise less volatility and greater security. In addition, they will have the support of their respective monetary institutions, responsible for ensuring financial stability.

Pressure to get on board with remote working, adapting to the changes in a market revolutionised by the pandemic, and dealing with customers who have new and urgent needs. Startups have faced unprecedented challenges in 2020, but their digital DNA has helped them make fast decisions to handle these tests.

Garanti BBVA offers its clients an advanced long-term currency transaction service through its Forward product, available on its website's business section.