BBVA Switzerland has signed an agreement to collaborate with the blockchain company Metaco to host its digital asset custody service, a trailblazer in Europe, on the  Harmonize™ platform. With this agreement, the bank is embarking on a new stage in its crypto strategy, characterized by the highest standards in security and greater agility in transactions. In addition, it opens the door to BBVA expanding its range of services in the future in order to meet the needs of its institutional clients.

ONE is the new software development culture at BBVA. Thanks to this initiative, over 15,000 developers will work in a more coordinated, collaborative manner, sharing best practices at the bank and in the industry with the goal of creating solutions that best meet customers’ needs.

Accenture and The New York Times have devoted the latest episode of their ‘Built For Change’ podcast to BBVA’s ongoing transformation. David Puente, global head of Client Solutions, describes a process that has been hugely successful for the BBVA app, but which is still far from over. The next big impact: artificial intelligence.

In 2022, more than $3.8 billion worth of cryptocurrencies were stolen. Traditional banks are therefore regaining ground to become service providers as custodians of crypto assets. This was the position advocated during the event hosted by El Confidencial by Alfonso Gómez, CEO of BBVA Switzerland. For more than two years now, BBVA Switzerland has enabled its customers to manage bitcoin, ether, and the rest of their investments from the online banking app.

Image: Alfonso Gómez, CEO of BBVA Switzerland, with Javier Molina, from El Confidencial, during a moment of his talk. /El Confidencial

Atom Bank, the UK’s first app based bank, has again received support from its long-term shareholders. BBVA, Toscafund and Infinity Investment Partners are participating in a new capital round of £100 million, about €115 million¹, to continue its growth in mortgages and loans to SMEs. Following this round, BBVA remains Atom’s leading shareholder.

There is a staggering $2.5 trillion global trade finance gap that mainly affects SMEs in emerging countries, limiting their ability to access new business opportunities. Helping businesses to bridge this finance gap, supply chain fintech Twinco Capital is today announcing it has secured an additional €50 million facility with BBVA Spark to accelerate growth.

BBVA has announced the creation of BBVA Technology, a new company that is to gather the experience and talent of the Group's three tech firms: BBVA Next Technologies, BBVA IT España, and Datio. The new company will have a more strategic focus while offering more career development opportunities for the bank’s tech teams.

Garanti BBVA and the Women Entrepreneurs Association of Türkiye (KAGIDER) commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Republic of Türkiye at the Women Entrepreneurs of the Year Summit.

IBM Institute for Business Value interviews Carmela Gómez on the opportunity that embedded finance brings to banks, digital platforms and consumers. The Global Head of Open Banking at BBVA states that embedded finance means a joint transformation of the entire ecosystem, both financial and non-financial, and that for its development to materialize, "we must look at the way in which our customers rely on interacting with financial services within their digital experiences. I believe banking will soon become very different from how we know it today, that’s why we need to fund this transformation now."

NFTs are unique and verifiable representations of digital assets, such as works of art, music, videos, virtual collectibles and other types of digital content, based on blockchain technology to guarantee their authenticity and ownership. Over 64 percent of those who purchase NFTs do so for profitability, while 12 percent are simply collectors.

BBVA has incorporated a new form of connection to its treasury solutions via API, reducing companies’ integration times for BBVA Pivot Connect by 80 percent. The first three APIs, available on BBVA Pivot, make it possible for companies to manage and trace payments to suppliers, track international payments, and check balances and transactions in accounts in any country.

BBVA Spark is the financial ally of high-impact companies and the partner of reference for the entire ecosystem of entrepreneurs. This unit, already present in Mexico, Spain and Colombia, will expand to the rest of the South American countries.

Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Red Hat, Cisco, IBM, Genesys, Salesforce and Telefónica all form part of BBVA's strategy of technological alliances. Thanks to these partnerships, BBVA has built up ways of working together, set up expert teams and developed cutting-edge tailor-made solutions with the most innovative tech companies, which are key to its growth and digitalization plans.

The main mission of BBVA's Security Operations team is to adopt all the necessary security measures in the face of an increasingly diverse cybercriminal reality. To this end, it has highly specialized teams in charge of assessing the security measures and processes implemented in the Group, as well as monitoring, detecting, and responding to any security risk or threat. Hundreds of hackers make up this team worldwide, organized into offensive, defensive, and transversal teams.

BBVA has relied on behavioral economics techniques to encourage employee participation in cybercrime training. The messages conveyed through the use of these techniques have effectively doubled interest in the course and, in some cases, increased course attendance by up to 70%. The initiative, which has been recognized by the Global Association of Applied Behavioural Scientists, will succeed in making the bank’s regular cybersecurity messages to its customers more effective.

BBVA has implemented a business banking service model that speeds up the response to the financial needs of multinationals when they expand into new markets. Employing more than 2,500 specialized managers, the new "Cross-Border" model cuts the requirements for opening non-resident accounts by up to 70 percent, thus drastically shortening the time required to set up new subsidiaries. BBVA Business Banking already works with more than 120,000 subsidiaries of business groups in 14 countries.

Garanti BBVA, a leading force in digitization in the Turkish banking industry, has announced the launching of Garanti BBVA Digital Assets,  the first venture of its subsidiary Garanti BBVA Financial Technologies. With a pilot already in progress, the company will initially provide services for transfer and custody of bitcoin and ether in the cryptoassets market.

The U.S., China and Europe are leading the development of this technology, which uses principles of quantum physics to perform calculations and information processing and has the potential to solve complex problems.

Presentation in March 2023 of the agreement to install a quantum computing center in San Sebastian, which will house the sixth IBM Quantum System One computer in the world. Image: EFE /Javier Etxezarreta

BBVA, Banco Santander and CaixaBank have joined forces to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing the banking sector, financial fraud. The three Spanish banks are working on tools to exchange relevant information and data to help prevent financial crime.

Iberpay, Swift, BBVA and several international banks have successfully completed the first pilot to process, in a real environment, instant payments between different currency areas. Their ultimate goal is to improve these international payments involving currency exchange in terms of speed, transparency, cost, availability and accessibility.

Chatbots have been automating everyday customer service tasks for years: they lighten the workload for employees and help businesses save time and money. The emergence of ChatGPT, however, has widened the scope of the technology, and its potential for streamlining and maximizing business processes, beyond anything we’ve seen before. The new chatbots can even write e-mails and debug computer code. ChatGPT’s instant popularity has prompted well-known app factories to launch a flood of similar artificial intelligence tools, but the benefits it offers for a specific range of communication and analysis tasks also come with limitations in a business setting.

The bank’s Deputy General Manager Işıl Akdemir Evlioğlu recently spoke with the Turkish edition of Fortune magazine to discuss Garanti BBVA's winning digital banking proposition.

Openpay, the BBVA Group's digital payments company, is positioning itself in the acquiring business in Latin America, with its annual volume of transactions processed in the region to reach 360 million by the end of March 2023. This exponential growth is the result of technological innovation in payment processes and the synergy it has established with the global financial institution, which has made it one of the main digital payment processing companies.

The financial institution is launching a new job portal to attract people with technological backgrounds in the different countries where it has a presence. The Group expects to end 2023 with over 2,600 new hires of this type of professionals, 1,000 of which will be in Spain.

The bank offers its data scientists and engineers an extensive and continuous training ecosystem, both in-house and in partnershipwith top international universities and educational institutions,so that they may apply the latest advances in artificialintelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics in thedevelopment of cutting-edge financial products. In addition, italso offers training to other professional profiles so that they canuse data analytics to solve business challenges in their areas.In just 5 years, the BBVA Campus has trained more than50,000 employees, including 900 data scientists, through theData University.

BBVA has now added to its product offering an ETN issued by Fidelity Exchange Traded Products GmbH that tracks the performance of bitcoin. Customers who qualify under the MiFID suitability assessment can sign up for the new product via BBVA's website or smartphone app.

BBVA Chair Carlos Torres Vila concluded the sixth edition of BBVA Open Summit, the annual entrepreneurship event, recalling the bank’s commitment to innovation. “BBVA has 600 million committed to various venture capital funds. The recent focus of these investments is on driving decarbonization and the development of innovative entrepreneurship in our main markets. Both areas make strategic sense for BBVA, to incorporate new knowledge into the Group and to support the companies we want to be our customers,” said Torres Vila at the closing of the event.

BBVA in Colombia redesigned its smartphone app. From now on, the app will feature a new interface, run faster, offer more security and provide new functionalities. This marks the launch in Colombia of BBVA's global mobile banking app, which is already active in Spain, Mexico, Peru and Argentina, among other countries. Today, more than 1.7 million Colombian users are using the new version of the app on their smartphones.

The CEO of BBVA in Switzerland has participated in the fifth edition of the Crypto Valley conference, the most emblematic event of the Crypto Valley Association (CVA), where he has emphasized the role of banking for blockchain developments alongside other leading experts in the industry.

The publication specialized in financial markets and investment banking has included BBVA AI Factory for the second time in its list of the best financial innovation labs in the world. The Innovators 2023 Awards also recognized the car comparison tool in Spain and the collection link for companies in Colombia as two of the outstanding innovations in the sector in the last year.

BBVA, the Comillas Pontifical University and the technology consultancy NTT DATA have unveiled Spain’s first master's degree in fintech, payments and online banking. The master's degree offers comprehensive, specialized, practical and advanced training in financial technologies with the aim of equipping future professionals with the skills to transform and lead the payments and online banking industries.

All ventures are born from a clever idea, but not all new ideas end up becoming new companies. In addition to creativity, in order to materialize a business idea, it is essential to obtain financing, visibility and investors. Startup incubators are entities that offer entrepreneurs guidance, training and resources to materialize their project.

It goes without saying that Europe has lagged behind other world powers in many of the technological races of recent decades: from the design of smartphones and the operating systems that control them to the development of artificial intelligence applications, e-commerce platforms or social networks, among other areas of competition. But there is a new race, still in its early stages, in which Europe seems determined not to be left behind: the issuance of CBDCs (central bank digital currencies), which are intended to be an electronic version of cash now that banknotes and coins are in clear decline as a means of payment.

The Mercury library stores the code that BBVA's data scientists reuse to develop analytical models embedded in a range of financial products. In line with the open source philosophy, the bank has published Mercury on Github, a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration. This means other programmers will be able to use Mercury code in their work, which will help drive fintech innovation and further evolve the library with contributions from the community.

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology are everyday topics that have emerged as a new form of global economy. Thus, BBVA in Switzerland is launching Blockchain to go, a series of educational pills to provide people and companies with the necessary knowledge to enter this new world with confidence and security.

The European Investment Fund (EIF) and BBVA are set to make it easier for startups with innovative and sustainable value propositions to get access to financing. The two institutions have concluded an agreement under the InvestEU guarantee programme whereby the EIF will grant a €200 million guarantee to enable BBVA Spark (BBVA’s specialised startup initiative) to strengthen its support for startups, helping them with their expansion plans.

The concept of digital identity -the personal data we voluntarily or involuntarily share online- is a cornerstone of cyberspace. Defining digital identity, regulating it and empowering the user is the next challenge we face.

The Markets in Cryptoassets (MiCA) Regulation is the EU regulation governing issuance and provision of services related to cryptoassets and stablecoins. Adopted on April 20, 2023, by the European Parliament, MiCA is the first and only legislation of its kind in the world and leads the way for other jurisdictions. MiCA will enter into force at some point between mid-2024 and early 2025.

The Spanish tech firm has integrated dasGate in its platform and targets 100 percent growth by 2023, with €26.3 million in revenue and 278 employees.

In 2021, seven banks, with BBVA as the only Spanish bank, participated in the launch of Swift Go. There are currently over 600 banks in 120 countries that offer this solution for low-value payments, streamlining the collection of payment for services to cross-border clients for SMEs, and making it easier for individuals to buy online in other countries. 85 percent of the payments made on this service are completed in three minutes or less.