EXCLUSIVE: “Follow the Yellow Brick Code” – Carmela Gómez, BBVA in The Fintech Magazine

BBVA was determined to find its own way across the new financial landscape by embracing open banking early and going into co-opetition with challengers. Carmela Gómez describes how it’s now pushing further on the promise of invisible, intuitive and predictive services

For years, instant payments was the destination that shimmered on the financial industry’s aspirational horizon. But for Carmela Gómez, Head of Global Embedded Finance at BBVA, that dream is already behind us.

“Instant is no longer ambitious enough,” she says. “Now we’re talking about payments so seamless they happen without users realising – technology that anticipates their needs, helps them manage their money, and even opens opportunities they might otherwise miss.”

Welcome to the new Oz of finance: a world where payments, credit, loyalty and more are embedded invisibly into everyday life – and where banks are no longer the gatekeepers of financial journeys, but the munchkins making them possible. At least, that’s one version of the story.

But BBVA chose an alternative narrative – one in which banks are the golden path itself, paving a smart, safe route toward customers’ goals, while fending off the flying monkeys of fraud, risk and regulation.

From instant to invisible

In this new landscape, finance isn’t an interruption – it’s an instinct.

“Our vision is to make finance not just useful, but natural,” Gómez explains. “It should enrich what you’re doing – whether that’s paying a bill, financing a purchase or managing your outgoings – without you even thinking about it.”

That ambition sits at the heart of BBVA’s strategy to protect the 30 per cent of traditional banking income that some estimates suggest is under threat from non-bank competitors – firms that offer banking-like services without being regulated banks. While some incumbents watched the challengers nibble at their margins, BBVA spotted the danger early and chose to play them at their own game. In 2017, it launched its Open API Market, a digital marketplace giving businesses and developers access to BBVA’s core services – from payments to identity verification – through a library of ready-to-integrate APIs.

Today, that foresight is paying off.

BBVA now has embedded finance partnerships across Spain, Turkey and Latin America, powering contextual financial services in retail, mobility, utilities and more. Gómez’s vision aligns with a global surge in embedded finance. Analysts such as Precedence Research and EY forecast the sector will soar from about US$148billion in 2025 to more than US$1.7trillion by 2034, with 85 per cent of financial executives saying the goal is ‘seamless financial offerings’.

But as Boston Consulting Group noted this year in its report, Moving Embedded Finance From Promise To Practice, disintermediating banks beyond the easy pickings of simple transactions has proven harder than expected. And non-bank platforms still require regulated partners that can manage credit, compliance and risk. In other words, they need banks like BBVA. BBVA is responding from a position of huge strength. With €772billion in assets, a presence in 25 countries, and nearly 80 million customers, Spain’s second-largest bank combines global scale with deep local expertise and, crucially, a sophisticated data and AI backbone.

APIs: The golden gateways

At the heart of BBVA’s evolution are APIs – elegant digital connectors that weave financial services into everything from e-commerce checkouts to mobility apps.

“It’s tempting to think of APIs as just bits of code,” Gómez says. “But they’re completely reshaping how banks interact with customers and how third parties offer services. They’re small, secure bridges that bring banking back into the customer journey.”

BBVA’s Open API Market provides those transitions, enabling third parties to plug bank-grade payments, loans, insurance and other transaction-related data insights directly into their own platforms. The result: banking where customers already are.

The approach lets BBVA have its cake and eat it – partnering with fintechs and marketplaces while still driving business back to its own products. It’s also a third way between the extremes facing traditional banks: becoming anonymous ‘pipes’ for innovation by others or clinging to old banking distribution models. BBVA does both – delivering banking-as-a-service through partnerships, while also using APIs to place its own offerings front and centre within partner ecosystems.

In 2025, it also became the first bank to enable real-time inbound payments from outside Europe via Iberpay’s One-Leg Out Instant Credit Transfer (OCT Inst) scheme – a milestone for cross-border, always-on connectivity.

“Customers expect things to happen instantly,” Gómez says. “But now they also expect them to happen without thinking – and that’s what APIs make possible.”

Each connection is another brick in the golden path. But every bridge invites new travellers – and some may be less trustworthy than others. The more invisible finance becomes, the more exposed its unseen edges. Recent research from UK Finance found that 59 per cent of banks believe open and embedded banking increases fraud exposure. TechUK warns of new attack surfaces – from BNPL integrations, to marketplace-lending plug-ins – while PwC’s 2023 report, Uncovering Value In Embedded Finance, identified five emerging risk zones: partner-ecosystem risk, regulatory ambiguity, data flow complexity, layered intermediation and consumer protection gaps.

“AI is a game-changer in fraud detection,” says Gómez. “Systems can analyse millions of data points in milliseconds, block suspicious transactions and alert you instantly.”

For BBVA, fighting fraud is both a technical and philosophical mission. The bank invests heavily in AI and generative AI, combining human oversight with machine precision to monitor billions of transactions securely. AI, Gómez says, is the bank’s ‘guardian angel’, silently scanning for threats while keeping experiences smooth. It’s not a fortress that keeps money safe – it’s an intelligent, invisible shield.

“Regulators have understood that open banking and embedded finance can create value for customers and foster innovation,” Gómez says. “But consent and authorisation are vital. Everything depends on the customer’s trust.”

As an early advocate for open banking, BBVA now argues that regulators should go further – towards a global open data regime, spanning industries and geographies. That, Gómez believes, is where the next revolution will come from: an economy where data moves as freely and securely as money. But challenges remain. As both Validat and TLT LLP highlight in separate risk reports, embedded finance often spans multiple jurisdictions and partner ecosystems, raising complex know your customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML) and data governance issues. Banking Dive also reports that more than a third of community banks adopting embedded finance cite compliance with data sharing laws as their biggest challenge.

That’s why Gómez insists regulation and innovation must advance together: “Banks build the rails; regulators make sure they’re safe to travel.”

Co-creating the journey

Behind BBVA’s embedded finance model lies a principle of partnership.

“We don’t push a pre-packaged suite,” Gómez says. “We listen. We co-design solutions around our partners’ ecosystem and customer needs.”

That approach has earned BBVA praise from many quarters. The Banker named BBVA the World’s Best Technology Bank in 2025, citing its pioneering use of data and AI to build trust, improve efficiency, and personalise customer journeys. Global Finance has also singled it out for making embedded finance a core plank of its digital strategy. From retail to B2B, its APIs deliver contextual, co-created banking experiences. It’s collaboration, not conquest, a co-designed path where banks, partners and customers move forward together.

AI: the great and powerful enabler

So, if APIs are the road, AI is then perhaps the wizard behind the curtain.

“Combining AI with personalisation helps us anticipate customer needs,” Gómez says. “Imagine you’ve just received your pay cheque and a bill is due. AI can suggest a one-click payment at exactly the right moment.”

The company’s partnership with Google Cloud’s Gemini AI suite brings that magic to life. Meanwhile, in Mexico, its AI assistant Blue now handles calls faster and more intuitively than ever. The bank is using AI to turn payments into moments of value, says Gómez: “If you buy a latte every morning, instead of generic points, you get a message: ‘Buy five, get the sixth free.’ Suddenly, paying feels like a benefit, not a cost.”

And, at the same time, AI defends the gates – verifying identity, detecting fraud, striking a balance between invisibility and security.

A road still under construction

In the first nine months of 2025, BBVA reported €7.98billion in profit and continued to lead in customer acquisition through digital channels. This is not just about adding new distribution, though, says Gómez. “It’s about monetising what banks do best – credit, trust, compliance and risk management – in new environments. “Our ambition is clear,” she adds. “We want to be the partner of reference for ecosystems that need banking services – not just offering products, but co-creating solutions that integrate naturally into people’s lives.

Award-winning innovation

• The Banker named BBVA the World’s Best Technology Bank 2025 for its pioneering AI-driven data strategy.
• Recent launches include its next-gen app in Spain, 24/7 cross-border instant payments, and expanded open API partnerships across Europe and Latin America.
• BBVA has an agreement with OpenAI to integrate genAI into staff workflows.
• The bank has finished the rollout of its Cloud-based ADA (analytics + data + AI) platform, which is now operational across all geographies within BBVA’s footprint, except in Turkey.

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #37, Page 44-45

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