PARIS FINTECH FORUM
Teleporting to the future: When did you see Captain Kirk take out a credit card?
BBVA me up, Scotty... Imagine your face as your payment device and an app that puts your financial management on autopilot. This is paytech, not Star Trek, and it’s closer than you think, says BBVA Head of Retail Customer Solutions Gonzalo Rodríguez Cash lives in pockets and now banking is moving there, too. BBVA has achieved its aim of getting half of its personal banking customers to interact with it digitally, and for 2019 it hopes to have 50 per cent of them using its mobile phone app. The reason is simple – people who bank through an app tend to interact with their bank several times a day, compared to once every 10 days via a website or monthly through a branch, according to BBVA. Enabling even more of these ‘smart interactions’ is one of the ‘four pillars’ that drive its customer policy.
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TheFintechMagazine | Issue 11
“Developing the customer relationship is key for us,” says Gonzalo Rodríguez, head of retail customer solutions. “Our vision begins with enabling customers to do everything from their mobile app in a very simple way, from becoming a new customer, to organising direct debits, to accessing a product. As customers go mobile, the frequency of our interaction with them increases by 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.” BBVA set its online and app targets in June last year. In December it announced it
had grown its digital customers by 23 per cent over the previous 12 months to 26 million – equivalent to 49 per cent of its total customer base – and of those, 21.7 million were using the mobile app. Key to migrating people to mobile has been giving the app, called Global Mobile (or the somewhat catchier GloMo for short), full access to all of the bank’s services – and, ultimately, across all of the bank’s geographies. Its work on GloMo earned BBVA the accolade of owning the best banking app in the world from analysts at US-based Forrester Research, who were impressed www.fintech.finance