Big interview
times too. At the end of 2020, the bank announced losses of $1.9bn, the fourth quarter of the year seeing net profits slump by almost half. By February 2021, it was being reported that bosses were planning to cut 3,800 jobs from their Spanish operations. Yet like the repository of its past, BBVA is nothing if not resilient. With an experienced new CIO at the helm, the bank has embarked on an ambitious programme of digitalisation, encompassing everything from mobile banking to bitcoin. Along the way, the Spanish company is helping reshape the industry at large, prodding staff towards greater efficiency and customers towards more personalised services. Clearly, none of this is easy. But like the ornate building on Plaza San Nicolas, it’s probably worth persevering nonetheless – if not for the present, then for generations to come.
Mexican save
Glance at José Luis Elechiguerra’s CV and one gets a decent idea of the complexity of modern banking. Barely in his 40s, after all, and the man has already been nearly everywhere at BBVA. He joined the bank in 2008, working at the mortgage division in his native Mexico. From there, he worked at BBVA Mexico’s retail department, then in business transformation. By 2015, Elechiguerra had graduated to head office across the Atlantic, and by 2019 had been promoted the global director of data governance. To put it another way, no one was likely surprised when, in late 2020, Elechiguerra became BBVA’s global head of engineering and organisation, the bank’s take on CIO. Yet, if the Mexican has had the kind of rise typical of a McKinsey man – he enjoyed two stints in those halls and four years at Procter and Gamble – he’s still able to reflect just how much has shifted during his journey. “The pace of development and adoption of smartphones has grown exponentially,” he says. “That, in combination with the internet boom, has resulted in a dramatic shift in the way our clients interact with their financial services. The most remarkable milestone of this era has been the smartphone, the possibility of doing virtually everything from it. And that, I think, is what has revolutionised not only the financial sector, but the world at large.” A reasonable point, and one backed by the statistics. The past year saw 26% more mobile banking app sessions than 2019, while in the UK alone 73% of consumers now use digital banking platforms every week. It goes without saying that these trends have been accelerated by the crises of the past few years, but Elechiguerra is careful to emphasise that they’ve been in the works for far longer. As a BBVA veteran, he should know. As early as 2007, his employer was honing platforms to store and process data at scale. By 2013, BBVA had already invested €2.4bn in new technology. That same year, it was processing 250 million remote transactions every day.
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
BBVA is hardly the only bank to move this way – even just in Spain. CaixaBank has experimented for years with hybrid clouds, while Sabadell now uses technology to make customer identification safer. Even so, Elechiguerra suggests that BBVA’s deep history with digitalisation made it uniquely positioned to face down the problems of the pandemic. “BBVA’s leadership in digital banking and mobile banking has been, and is, a differential fact,” he says. “Thanks to the transformation that our bank started tackling over a decade ago, our customers and clients were able to better cope with the situation resulting from the health crisis, since they were able to access the totality of our product range digitally.” Certainly, Elechiguerra and his colleagues show no signs of slowing down. After all, they recently announced a strategy to transform BBVA into a “truly digital company” that uses technology to reach every corner of customers’ lives. Elechiguerra, for his part, describes the move as coming from the “highest strategic level” of the company – and one that will continue to be a strategic priority.
Hedge your bets
Imagine you’re a hedge fund and you’re keen to diversify your portfolio. What do you do? One option is to invest in regular stocks: gold, oil, consumer goods. But what if you wanted to try something less tangible, less secure – but potentially more lucrative too? You could dabble in bitcoin. Long dismissed as a hobby for pubescent amateur traders, digital currencies are increasingly catching the eye of more established institutions. Little wonder, then, that ambitious banks like BBVA are rushing to fill the gap. As the Spanish company explained in June 2021, its new bitcoin trading service would be especially designed for private banking clients in Switzerland, helping them invest across a range of digital assets. For Elechiguerra, the move is typical of BBVA’s commitment to keeping a close eye on what its customers are looking for. “In blockchain, as a financial institution,” he explains, “we remained
José Luis Elechiguerra, global head of engineering and organisation, BBVA.
26%
Increased mobile banking app
sessions compared with 2019.
Fintech Times 94% Tricor 9
BBVA retail products and services now available as do-it- yourself transactions.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61
