Financial service Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) has announced it will merge its three tech firms in order to enhance and map out more strategic offerings.
BBVA Next Technologies, BBVA IT España and Datio will converge next year and bring together 3,000 employees as well aim to develop more career development opportunities for the bank’s tech team.
The CEO of BBVA Technologies, Ricardo Jurado, will lead the new tech company as its CEO once the integration process has concluded.
A BBVA statement reads: “The new company will consolidate the teams’ technical expertise, with access to new career development opportunities and professional growth, while concentrating the company’s processes into a single model.
“The evolution towards a single brand intends to foster the attraction of new talent and the creation of a new value proposition, aiming to reinforce satisfaction and loyalty of current teams.”
Furthermore, the overriding focus of the new BBVA tech firm will look to develop software transformation being one of the strategic priorities of BBVA Engineering the next several years.
BBVA also recently took steps to bolster banking activation, through enabling customers to register for a new bank account and log into an existing one at the bank’s partnering retailers through the Bizum service.
As a result of that expansion, BBVA partner merchants became enabled to adopt the service and will be supported by the bank to do so, after which they’ll get an increase in sales through the streamlining of digital payments, the bank further explained.
The latest financial feature adds to the youth-oriented BBVA service initiative, providing young people with the opportunity to make balance inquiries, top up their cell phone, withdraw cash from ATMs and send money through Bizum, all through the bank’s mobile app.
Internal data quoted shows that, since the end of April, more than 40,000 young people have activated the Bizum functionality on their BBVA app, leading to around 200,000 transactions made to either send money or pay in stores.
Bizum revealed it is on course to make 23 million registered users by the end of 2023 and beat its 2022 record for total transactions valued at €47m.
