“Beam me up, Scotty” which means something like “Teletranspórtame, Scotty” is a popular phrase from the Star Trek series that Captain Kirk used to ask the chief engineer of the’ Enterprise ‘to use the beam of light transporter to get on the ship.
With the title ‘BBVA me up, Scotty’, the report in the latest issue of The Fintech Magazine, published by Fintech Finance, describes how BBVA is already using technological solutions worthy of the science fiction series. “Imagine that your face is your payment device and that your ‘app’ makes the management of your finances take place in autopilot mode. This is ‘paytech’, not Star Trek”says Gonzalo Rodríguez, global head of Retail Customer Solutions at BBVA.
The transformartion of the world banking
The digital transformation of the world banking is an essential revolution that the sector has to undertake to preserve its relevance to its customers. Derek White, global head of Client Solutions at BBVA, reflects on what banks can learn from new digital formats such as the Fornite video game to achieve this goal.
The article highlights that 50% of BBVA’s clients already use the bank’s digital channels, and that the goal for 2019 is to achieve this same objective also for mobile banking. BBVA’s focus on mobile banking has a clear motivation: people interact in this way with the bank even several times a day, while they visit the web once every ten days or the offices once a month. This is explained in the article by Gonzalo Rodríguez: “Our vision begins with making it easier for customers to do everything from their mobile ‘apps’ in a very simple way, from becoming a customer of the bank, to organizing their debit accounts or accessing a product. As the customer moves to the mobile, the frequency of our interactions with him increases up to two or three times a day, and this opens up the possibility of offering new experiences, products and services that were impossible in the past”.
A key for BBVA has been able to accelerate the adoption of its mobile banking services, according to the publication, has been the development of the bank’s mobile global development platform, a pioneer in the sector. The publication highlights how this and other advances in the development of mobile banking have served BBVA to be at the head of the sector and receive different recognitions, such as the Forrester consultancy that chose the BBVA Spain ‘app’ as the best in the world. Or as the ‘The Banker’ prize, which marked BBVA as ‘Banco del año’ on the American continent last November.
Invisible payments, with which BBVA intends to make payment transactions more comfortable and faster for its customers, are also highlighted in the article as an innovation that seems to come out of a fiction film, but is already in the hands of customers. One example is the system deployed at the BBVA headquarters in Madrid, where employees can already pay using a facial recognition system based on artificial intelligence.
The four pillars of the digital strategy
“Offering all of its banking services through the screen of a mobile phone is just one of the pillars on which BBVA’s ambitious strategy is based”, points out the article, which also highlights other innovative services such as the aggregation of bank accounts from other entities within the bank’s ‘app’, or the launch of Bconomy, the tool to improve the financial health of customers.
In the article, Rodríguez points out the four pillars that underpin BBVA’s digital strategy: the first is to make the maximum number of banking services available to customers through digital channels in self-service format (DIY); the second is to move to an advisory model that combines “best technology with human advice”. The third is to develop incredible experiences that surprise customers and “help them achieve their vital goals” and finally, the fourth is to create “intelligent interactions” that bring products closer to customers. BBVA’s vision is that this fourth pillar will evolve towards the offer of automated services that can reach decisions made by customers to facilitate the daily management of their finances. The idea is to encourage customers to trust BBVA to offer day-to-day control of their finances and meet their savings goals”
In this vision, data plays an important role, which is key to BBVA’s “modernization plan” to create “autonomous banking” services. The Bconomy functionality, which analyzes the client’s history to predict future movements and even alerts the user to possible discoveries, is already a foretaste of what may be a reality for customers in the near future, in which the bank will be able to actively offer advice. to the client and propose, for example, to move money from one account to another to avoid an overdraft or save more intelligently. “The idea is to anticipate the needs of the client and even, going a step further, propose to the client to automate certain functions. The system could ask the client if he wants him to manage his finances so that he does not have to do anything to avoid discoveries. The idea is to encourage clients to relax, forget about their finances and trust BBVA to offer day-to-day control or fulfill their savings goals”.
Global aspiration
Rodríguez also addresses in the interview BBVA’s strategy of developing digital products and services that, even if they are born in a country, can quickly reach other geographies where the Group operates. “We believe that globalization is a key competitive advantage for BBVA. Be able to develop a component in Mexico, and integrate it into Spain the next day” he says. BBVA has already taken the first steps of this deployment with the launch of the global development platform in Mexico and Uruguay, which will soon also reach Peru and Argentina. “Our aspiration is to have the best capabilities, not only in countries such as Spain or Turkey, but in all geographies, that’s why we develop solutions as a Group”.
Also published on Medium.