Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria S A : BBVA announces finalists in it Open Talent Ideas competition

BBVA has announced the 10 finalists in its Open Talent Ideas Competition - aimed at finding a banking model that works for both customers and banks in an era of historically low interest rates.

BBVA launched the competition back in February with the aim to seek out the most innovative, creative outside of the box thinking about possible solutions to the challenge.

Since then we have had more than 300 ideas submitted, from 49 countries and with solutions ranging across 17 different sectors including retail banking, commercial, SME amd corporate.

We also saw ideas submitted from a range of people with many different backgrounds, including working, retired, academia and students.

We then conducted four separate review rounds, whittling the submissions down from that figure of 302 down to our last ten finalists - with the winner now due to be announced at the start of June.

The ideas submitted included ways in which social media could be used to add value to a person's financial assets, ideas around the better use of data to add value to a person's financial life and creating single point of contacts between banks, tenants and landlords to ease housing issues.

For the full breakdown of the ten finalists and their ideas for improving banking, visit www. https://www.centrodeinnovacionbbva.com/opentalent/ideas.

The low-interest rate challenge is being set as part of BBVA's long-standing Open Innovation initiatives, which includes the BBVA Open Talent competition, and which aims to actively seek out, grow, and support the best new ideas for the banking sector.

The winner will scoop up a €10.000 prize, along with the opportunity to work with the bank's senior executives on developing their idea. The finalists will now be coming to Madrid to discuss and defend their ideas in front of the jury consisting of BBVA's top management.

Given the international trend of reducing the use of cash, whether due to the evolution of means of payment or national policies aimed at combating the shadow economy, fiscal fraud and greater regulation of Anti Money Laundry, the bank should consider Start transforming your physical network by following this trend. The creation of Cash Less offices, where cash is not managed, is an idea aligned with the trend of less cash use, but above all aligned with a model of attention focused on advising on investment decisions and client financing. The network of offices Cash Less should be considered as a natural evolution, a network parallel to the traditional network, but that involves the gradual replacement of offices, always maintaining enough classic offices and ATMs to provide cash service when needed. This Cash Less network presents obvious advantages in terms of efficiency, since it eliminates a large part of the current costs of security, surveillance, cash flow, cashier service, time invested in tonnage and a lighter and adapted installation to the new digital environment . In each zone or territory a network adaptation plan should be evaluated using the current or greater current use of cash per office as the driver. International reduction trend to reduce cash use (Denmark).