Posted on

BBVA’s Scarlett Sieber on embracing innovative directions in banking

While some banks and fintech professionals are still just talking about embracing new directions with their businesses, Scarlett Sieber and BBVA are doing just that today. Scarlett is the senior vice president of global business development and she’s created a live case study of reengineering an incumbent bank to become the center of a technology ecosystem. In Scarlett’s case, she’s helping BBVA to harness the innovation of external partners as well as bring in-house the core technology and design skills to take the bank into the future.

Scarlett presented at the Tradestreaming Money conference in NYC in November of 2016. The audio you’re about to hear was part of her talk about building financial ecosystems with leading banks at the center.

Subscribe: iTunes I SoundCloud

Below are highlights, edited for clarity, from the episode.

Creating BBVA’s digital team

Our team has really diverse backgrounds. We definitely have technologists. We have a lot of people like me who have an entrepreneurial background both within financial services and from outside the industry. We have our experts in banking (you can’t be successful without having those people). We also have people from the PayPals of the industry. So, we have a very diverse global team.

 

BBVA's Scarlett Sieber on financial innovation

 

Building the bank of the future through internal incubation

We’re attacking the fintech ecosystem in a variety of ways. First, we do internal incubation, which is launching our own startups. We’re doing that simultaneously in Spain and in the U.S. We have about seven companies going to market in the next six months. These companies start as projects focused on problems BBVA is trying to solve and we kept them very much separate from the rest of the bank so they can go test things, learn quickly, and fail. We take those learnings back to BBVA if they don’t make it.

Using strategic partnership to drive innovation

We were the first bank to partner with Dwolla. For all the JP Morgans in the industry partnering with OnDeck, we were the first. We built a reputation in the industry of  looking for ways to attract new customers as well as ways to diversify our product offerings to our existing customer base.

Posted on

[podcast] BBVA’s Scarlett Sieber on the building of a consumer banking ecosystem

BBVA's Scarlett Sieber on the building of a consumer banking ecosystem
BBVA's Scarlett Sieber
BBVA’s Scarlett Sieber

Spain-based BBVA is one of the most creative and aggressive global banks when it comes to investing in new financial technology. In part, that’s because they have Scarlett Sieber on the team. Her formal title is SVP of Global Business Development in the New Digital Business Unit but the reality is, in that role, she’s part business developer, ecosystem designer, and marketer.

Scarlett joins us this week on the podcast. We talk a lot about how the role of banks is changing and what thought leaders are doing to stay ahead of the curve and how BBVA’s Open API initiative strives to be the AWS of banking.

We discuss the role of financial ecosystems in determining the future of consumer banking. For BBVA, she’s helped build direct channels in the US into fintech startups, venture capitalists, mentoring and sponsoring at top accelerators, universities, and technology consortia — all in an effort to work together, innovate together, and collaborate together to leverage the talents of all the players in the space.

Below are lightly edited and condensed highlights from the conversation.

The value of the financial ecosystem

The ecosystem is imperative for our strategy. Some organizations are competing by throwing money at innovation centers and interact with startups. Startups are just one piece of the larger puzzle. You have to think about other players in the space. Venture capitalists have a lot of deal flow and have unique perspectives. Accelerators see a ton of startups come through and we spend a lot of time playing a mentorship role at accelerators. Now you’re seeing fintech groups at a lot of the major universities. We also spend a lot of time with our competitors as part of BBVA’s involvement in the R3 blockchain consortium. We look to work together with all the players who are directly and indirectly in the space to provide value and find ways to work together.

Investing in fintech innovation versus partnering

We took the initiative to spin off our venture capital fund and it’s expanded to $250 million now, as well. BBVA Ventures is now called Propel. The idea there is, as a true VC, your true goal is to earn a return on your investments. Other times, it makes more sense to partner with BBVA Compass, like with our relationships with p2p payments, Dwolla and roboadvisor, FutureAdvisor.

When it comes to buying fintech companies, we don’t have an acquisition budget. We buy things that we think are necessary, strategic and relevant to what our initiatives are. Our acquisitions come from heads of departments. One of my favorite acquisitions is a San Francisco-based design shop, Spring Studio. As technology changes and consumers want a beautiful user experience, it made sense for us to buy a company that does it really well and has a great reputation.

We’re also creating startups within BBVA, so there’s a lot of opportunity for partnerships, there, too.

The last piece is our open platform, banking as a service. Shamir Karkal, CFO and cofounder of Simple, has left to become our head of our global, open API platform. In this case, we’re not directly investing in, acquiring or partnering with outside companies but we’re exposing our banking plumbing to the fintech community at large.

 

Photo credit: claudiolobos via Visualhunt / CC BY