BBVA has launched a new global software division that brings together more than 16,000 developers across the Group. This new division will speed up delivery of digital solutions and make them more easily scalable across the countries where the bank operates.

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.

BBVA continues to emphasize its digital transformation as an essential factor in achieving its ambitious goals, presented at Investor Day. In this interview, Global Head of Client Solutions David Puente highlights how being a pioneer in digitization gives BBVA an advantage to continue growing in areas such as payments and insurance, create alliances through ‘open banking’ and, in particular, to take a new strategic leap: evolve from providing services to proactive recommendations to help customers improve their financial health and transition to a decarbonized economy.

On Wednesday, BBVA’s CEO participated in a discussion on technology and confidence in the banking sector at the Global Banking Summit organized by Financial Times. Onur Genç explained that BBVA wants to be the bank its customers trust and help them to improve their financial health.

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.

BBVA is an overall digital experience leader five year in a row according to ‘The Forrester Digital Experience Review™: European Mobile Banking Apps, Q3 2021’. The report identifies leaders in mobile banking functionality and user experience (UX) and shares best practices that digital and customer experience (CX) professionals can learn from. BBVA is the only Spanish bank that is an overall leader in mobile banking digital experience.

The world is moving towards sustainable economic models which by 2030 could create economic opportunities worth $12 trillion a year. Through technologies such as advanced data analytics, blockchain or artificial intelligence, fintech can help companies to evaluate and reduce their environmental impact, and investors to channel their operations towards more sustainable assets.

The BBVA Group, which already invests in artificial intelligence technologies and contributes to its general ecosystem in Turkey, is now joining the educational and awareness campaign “10million.AI,” a global social responsibility project by the Swiss company Global AI Hub.

Diversity should not merely be a passing trend, but a fair way to perceive the world on a daily basis. Companies and startups must design their products and services without leaving anyone behind, taking into account all ages, body types and abilities.

BBVA Research keeps making progress in its project to measure the economy in real time and high definition, adding an index to measure investment and its components in its operating countries to its range of Big Data indicators.

Bitcoin and ether are the best known cryptocurrencies, but there are thousands on the market with different purposes and functions. Cardano, binance coin or USD coin are some of those that are gaining more and more relevance.

BBVA's Swiss subsidiary, which specializes in private banking, is launching New Gen, a new 100% digital investment account that can be accessed with an initial deposit of $10,000 or its equivalent in euros or Swiss francs.

We cannot confidently predict the future, but we can build it. Future studies or research in futurology are one of the best tools to guide our personal projects and wishes, as well as to design the strategy for the coming years of our company or startup and therefore succeed with innovation.

Valora Coches, the BBVA Group tool for customers and non-customers that helps you decide whether to change your vehicle or not, continues to grow. From its late February 2020 launch in Spain until July 2021 it registered almost two million hits and more than 900,000 vehicle searches. In March 2021, the tool reached its highest figures with 100,000 hits and 50,000 car searches.

BBVA's state-of-the-art data processing centers (DPCs) hold the most prestigious certifications in the world in terms of design, construction and operational sustainability. This ensures that the Group's operations are maintained in the face of possible contingencies, offering the best service to its customers under virtually any circumstances.

In less than a year, BBVA has issued one million Aqua cards in Spain. This groundbreaking system, which eliminates data from the plastic and uses dynamic CVV, is expanding rapidly in Latin American subsidiaries. Mexico, Peru and Colombia already have the first features.

The coronavirus crisis has made us more aware of how vulnerable we are to unforeseen events. As a result, in the new social context the insurance industry and insurtechs have been driven to strengthen their customer focus, digitisation, health insurance and microinsurance, with innovation at the fore.

The Payment Systems Department (GÖSAŞ) at Garanti BBVA is developing innovative solutions to meet the new needs of both businesses and SMEs while streamlining their digitization process.

Trading listed products is becoming more and more popular. In recent years, various apps and digital platforms have democratized this activity to make it available to practically any user. The sale of listed assets is no longer the realm of qualified brokers and investors, but for the general public.

The BBVA in Spain app is celebrating its 10th anniversary as a key element in the bank’s commitment to lead the digitalization of banking in the country. Since 2011, the app has adapted its functionalities to the times and needs of its customers, at first by allowing them to operate remotely with ease and total security, and over the years with the deployment of a wide range of personalized tools to help them make decisions about their personal finances.

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.

We are increasingly aware of the importance of passwords: we create stronger ones, change them regularly and make sure not to use the same ones for everything. We also know that one of the biggest risks we face is password theft, since passwords unlock our information. But are we as careful with the passwords we store in our browsers?

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.

Decentralized finance is a blockchain-based set of applications that, in principle, need no intermediaries to work. These financial products have similar characteristics to traditional services and their boom period could, to some extent, change the financial sector and give rise to both opportunities and challenges.

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.