BBVA accelerates the creation of global solutions with Red Hat

Based in Bilbao, Spain, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) provides banking and financial services to more than 82 million customers in over 25 countries. Its markets are Spain, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Turkey.

BBVA needed to update its process automation technology to support its growth and improve its customer experience. The new platform, supported by Red Hat® Process Automation Manager and currently deployed in Mexico and Spain, now implements processes in hours rather than days

Juan Calatrava, Head of IT Strategy, Deployment & Regulations, BBVA: Looking beyond current geopolitical tensions, we are in an emerging, post-pandemic economic recovery that accelerated many trends that had already been developing. 

• Customers are interacting with us remotely through digital channels more and more. 
• The competitive environment is increasingly being shaped by innovation (cloud computing, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data) and disruptive technologies (blockchain and quantum computing). 
• The global movement towards carbon reduction presents challenges and opportunities for the financial sector.

Calatrava: BBVA has ambitious growth objectives. Our main challenge with technology capabilities is to maintain the highest level of customer service through all our channels, with a focus on security and efficiency, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by using innovative, cloud-based technologies and by collaborating with companies such as Red Hat.

We are working on several objectives, including:

• Ensuring that we provide high-quality service, by making our channels available to our customers and providing effective security capabilities to help mitigate the number and sophistication of cyberattacks on a global level.
• Gathering more than 16,000 developers under a new global software development division to help accelerate the creation of high-quality, more security-focused, and scalable global solutions for deployment in all our regions of operation. Through adopting DevOps and automation, and managing talent in a differential way, our goal is to transform how we develop software to increase productivity and efficiency.
• Evolving our banking platform into a hybrid platform, (using private cloud environments and partnering with Red Hat), and public cloud environments, which allow us to take advantage of the new cloud technologies for globality, scalability, productivity, and cost optimization, while continuing to optimize our existing platform.

Antonio Valle, Global Head of Process Automation Cloud Architecture, BBVA: In the past, we acquired proprietary solutions with licenses that we often customized according to the requirements of users within our organization. These customized solutions were difficult to evolve into new versions and impossible to integrate with other products or third-party solutions. As a result, we created isolated groups within our organization and ruled out any possibility of reusing solutions.

At BBVA, we are implementing a new platform that will radically change how we work. Thanks to automation, developers can create processes and deploy them in a matter of hours, instead of days. This allows our developers to focus on innovation and product creation instead of routine tasks. Likewise, developers now have more powerful process tracking capabilities than the previous manual versions. Lastly, our developers can fully or partially reuse any process and implement it in minutes in any of the group’s countries of operation.

Valle: Red Hat Process Automation Manager satisfies three key objectives. 1) It is more agile in process creation and development, so we can serve our customers efficiently. 2) It gives us visibility at any point in the process, so we can identify anomalies and improve proactive service and continuous improvement. 3) It ensures consistency in process execution when clients carry out tasks through different channels.

Red Hat provides a large portfolio of open source products and has experience with implementation in large corporations, combining technology and service. With Red Hat’s help, we can promote work in the community using a highly collaborative model that allows each member of the BBVA team to propose functional improvements and develop them directly.

Valle: Red Hat has helped BBVA in the way we work. Throughout the process, we have had close and frequent contact with the Red Hat team, which has continuously proved to be a partner with a high level of commitment to BBVA and our projects at all levels.

With Red Hat, we have actively participated in product design and development, and in prioritizing new functionalities. We are building a platform designed through collaboration, the use of open source platforms, and the reuse of components, allowing us to meet the specific needs of each market.

Valle: We have more efficient operational processes, including global models. It is about building a product once and deploying often throughout multiple geographies, making the different components available to developers. To that end, we rely on key concepts such as self-service through automated and agile processes, eliminating third party intervention.

Calatrava: At BBVA, we’re oriented towards data-based decision-making, especially in the area of technology. This is why we measure our operations intensively so we can monitor how our strategy is deployed and make improvements to productivity, quality, and efficiency. 

Calatrava: One objective of our software development transformation is accelerating the creation of global solutions. This is fundamental because it reduces time to market, generates efficiencies, and improves experiences. We want to evolve into a global platform that takes advantage of new available technologies.

Valle: We want BBVA to be the best process-oriented organization. In recent years that has meant important changes at the organizational level, and in the technological platform we are building. This has a direct influence in terms of agility, scalability, and reliability. Customers want immediate service, eliminating processes, teams, or people who do not add value.

Valle: The digital customer wants high-quality, personalized products with short delivery times. At BBVA, we are implementing a cloud platform to automate processes and business decisions, increasing our agility in process creation and deployment. We want to serve clients efficiently, providing personalized financial services that help them achieve their goals. The faster, the better. In short, we want to offer a user experience at all points of customer contact—branches, mobile phones, ATMs, the internet, and social networks, on any device. And of course, we need to protect and guarantee all those processes with an embedded, security-based approach.