Investor interest in the healthcare innovation market is reflected in record funding numbers and a myriad of opportunities for startup growth and collaboration. However, it is not all plain sailing for entrepreneurs in the sector, who face challenges such as the need to differentiate themselves in an increasingly crowded landscape.

BBVA New Gen, the investment product offered by the Group’s Swiss franchise, has completed its first year of existence. In a move to streamline the onboarding process, the bank now lets prospective customers sign up online just by uploading a ‘selfie’, after which their identity is verified in a matter of seconds. BBVA Switzerland is leveraging this technology, which can verify identity documents and passports from more than 190 countries, to boost its international expansion.

Almost 1,000 engineers have joined BBVA in the first half of 2022. A figure that the financial institution expects to double by the end of this year. These are technology profiles that are embedded throughout the different countries where the bank has a presence, 400 of them in Spain.

The southern Swiss city of Lugano has stepped up cryptocurrency use and is developing new infrastructure to adopt Bitcoin, Tether and its own LVGA token as legal tender. In the coming months, Lugano residents will be able to use cryptocurrencies to pay their taxes and make purchases at more than 200 local businesses.

Anxiety, stress or fatigue are some of the problems that startup creators often face. Summer can be a good time to focus on how important it is to protect your emotional wellbeing and strike a balance before getting back to the routine. Learning to manage failure, knowing how to delegate and enjoying time to disconnect are some of the things that experts recommend for taking care of mental health.

Fast Company has included BBVA AI Factory in its annual list of ‘Best Workplaces for Innovators.’ BBVA’s artificial intelligence (AI) center was ranked 40th in the world and first in the category of companies with fewer than 100 employees for fostering knowledge-sharing among employees and supporting female talent.

The British publication The Banker, part of the Financial Times Group, has selected BBVA as the best digital bank in Europe and Latin America in its Innovation in Digital Banking Awards. The specialized magazine also granted a third prize in this edition for the best Bank/Fintech Partnership, specifically to Veridas' biometric solution for BBVA Mexico's pensioner customers.

BME, through Iberclear, BBVA and the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB), have completed the first bond issuance in Spain listed in a regulated market and registered using blockchain technology developed by ioBuilders. This platform could serve as a basis for future issuances in Spain and in Latin America and the Caribbean.

From finance to pharmaceuticals, an increasing number of companies from different industries are embracing the opportunities that quantum computing opens. Participants at a recent BBVA Open Talks explored the collaboration needed between researchers, companies and new professionals to take a leap into the next technological era and fully leverage its advantages.

BBVA recently presented BBVA Spark, its full financial services proposition for innovative, high growth companies in their different stages of growth. Spark provides these companies with all their financial needs within the same place, and gives them access to sophisticated financing products, such as venture debt and growth loans. To do so, BBVA Spark will offer them a unique relationship management model with a team of experts who speak their language.

The emerging company will work on a technological solution to boost the development of synthetic data. They will replace real data while testing artificial intelligence models, thus protecting user privacy. Their proposal was selected by BBVA AI Factory in the framework of the University of Navarra’s SofIA startup accelerator program.

The strategic agreement with Genesys®, a leader in cloud customer experience orchestration, is enabling BBVA to introduce the advantages of cloud computing in its centers in Spain and Latin America. Both entities are already working together to migrate remote customer care services in these regions, where they have been able to reduce waiting times, thus improving customer satisfaction levels through BBVA’s use of the Genesys Cloud CX™ solution.

During the closing day of South Summit, BBVA revealed that it is preparing a complete range of financial services adapted to the different stages of growth of startups and scaleups. “We want to be the bank for high-growth companies and finance them,” said Roberto Albaladejo, Head of Banking for Growth Companies, who added that there is a “great opportunity” to help them and build “long-term relationships” with them.

At the South Summit, BBVA presents the BBVA Virtual Space, an immersive environment with which the bank wants to explore new ways of interacting with customers through the metaverse. This development, which allows experimenting how a banking service based on virtual reality could be, is also the protagonist of a 'hackathon' in which people are invited to offer new features or virtual experiences.

BBVA’s Turkish unit consolidates its lead in innovative digital payment solutions by adding a new dimension to card transactions with digital receipts, a first in the Turkish banking sector.

Over 2.9 billion people around the world have never used the internet. Whether through lack of infrastructure or gaps in learning, unequal access to ICTs (also known as the digital divide) is an obstacle to development. We explore what options are available to heal the wound that affects 37% of the world's population.

BBVA CEO Onur Genç stated that “BBVA has a competitive advantage” in the context of digital acceleration resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. “Digitization boosts our business,” he said during his presentation at the 17th Banking Industry Meeting organized by IESE in Madrid. In March 2022, BBVA added 90,000 new customers in Spain - the largest monthly figures in its history. Over half (52.25 percent) of these customers reached the bank through digital channels.

BBVA will invest a total of 15 million euros in Leadwind, a venture capital fund managed by K Fund. In this first phase, the fund will raise 140 million euros to support technology companies in Spain, Portugal and Latin America.

The boom in cryptocurrencies, particularly in regions like Latin America, has lead numerous governments to create legislation to take advantage of the benefits and mitigate the risks. And they are not the only new alternative to cash - several central banks, including the European Central Bank, are looking into the possibility of issuing their own digital currencies. During a BBVA Open Talks event, the speakers debated how these changes will define the future of money.

Truora has raised $15 million in a series A funding round led by Propel, the fund that manages BBVA’s fintech investments, and Acel - one of the main investors in technology and the Internet. This new injection of capital will allow Truora to reinforce its expansion in Mexico with its solution to verify users through WhatsApp.

The world of medicine is experiencing an unprecedented transformation. The pandemic has highlighted the importance of digitisation and a number of different technologies are making an impression on this field, with solutions to improve both diagnosis and treatment. On the occasion of World Health Day, we're taking a close look at this wave of entrepreneurship to find out which trends and advances are leading the way in this sector.

The BBVA and Anthemis partnership led the first pre-seed funding for Wiserentr with an investment of one million euros. The Spanish startup raised a total of €1.6 million in the funding round, in which Shard Capital also participated. Its novel service reinvents the way to access high-end technology, as users pay a fixed fee throughout the time they use the electronic device. Once the set rental time has ended, it can be returned or purchased to use indefinitely.

Carlos Torres Vila attended one of the activities of the Code.org programming course for children of BBVA employees. The BBVA Chair shared a day with 146 boys and girls between 5 and 13 years of age to promote programming training among young people.

Garanti BBVA Asset Management, Turkey's first portfolio management company, continues to offer innovative solutions to its investors. In this context, the company recently created the "Garanti Asset Management Metaverse and New Technologies Variable Fund (MET)", the first fund in Turkey to focus on metaverse - the new virtual and real-world network that is expected to replace the internet in the future.

In recent years, the term proptech (technology applied to property) has become popular across the various strands of the housing market. The emergence of startups using tech tools like big data and artificial intelligence, as well as the inevitable digitisation of countless traditional companies due to the Coronavirus crisis, has laid the foundations for this sector to be reinvented.

Atom, the UK's first app-based bank, has raised more than £75m in new equity (around €90m)¹. Together with Toscafund and Infinity Investment Partners, BBVA has led this round, which is still open to other shareholders of the company. BBVA has once again shown its support for the Atom project and team, of which it has been a shareholder since 2015 and which it has supported in all its share capital increases. BBVA is currently the main shareholder, with a 39% holding.

Promoting open banking with APIs, retaining digital customers with artificial intelligence and enhancing traceability in logistics with blockchain are the technological solutions devised by five startups that have run pilots with BBVA Open Innovation. Now they are identifying their next steps to tackle the challenges ahead.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies has gone in this fourteenth edition to Judea Pearl for “bringing a modern foundation to artificial intelligence”. The Professor of Computer Science at the University of California (UCLA), has made contributions that enable AI programs to use two of the key resources we humans use to interpret the world and arrive at decisions: probability and causality.

BBVA has renewed the processors of its Data Processing Centers (DPC) in Spain and Mexico, with the help of IBM, to achieve significant energy and environmental improvements. In the case of its DPC in Tres Cantos (Madrid), a recent study carried out by BBVA has concluded that the installation of the new IBM z15 central processing equipment is already allowing the use of 50% less energy than with the previous data processors and, in a period of five years, the emission of carbon gases will have been reduced by half, a very significant figure when it comes to moving towards a more sustainable model.

BBVA will create 200 jobs in two years, with the launch of two technology centers in Bilbao. These centers will have specialized profiles such as computer, telecommunications, systems and industrial engineers, as well as mathematicians.

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.

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.