"Catastrophy as Opportunity" with Carlos Torres Vila (BBVA) & Marcelo Claure (Softbank)

hi so great to be here at this digital edition of south summit i'm super excited to introduce our next conversation two of the great top keynote speakers for this year's edition of south summit which is carlos torres villa chairman of bbva and marcelo claude chief executive officer of softbank group international carlos marcelo thank you so much for being here it's a pleasure thank you thank you liz the coveted crisis and everything that it has disrupted what are the main impacts for your business carlos maybe we can start with you uh for us our day-to-day has

changed dramatically we were able to uh anticipate uh um the the crisis by sending our people home and really prioritizing health over anything else prioritizing the health of our employees the health of uh our clients and thanks to our digital capability we've been able to serve our customers and continue to be there for them with a very uh small proportion of our people really uh having to go to the branches to open them up we have seen dramatic increase in the um in-app up registrations drama i think it's 30 globally increase in-app usage so clearly

technology has come to the rescue in terms of providing the service in our case we have also taken a step forward in terms of supporting society with about 50 million dollar uh commitment of money a big part of that was out of bbva's own funds another portion was fundraising from clients and fundraising from employees and that has gone to medical equipment at the beginning quite strongly supporting the you know bringing ventilators and the likes uh also supporting the most vulnerable in the places where we're present we'll talk about la tam in a minute and then

finally also doing some funding for uh covet related research mostly out of our foundation so one is it's hard to sometimes talk about how good business is going right when you're experiencing so many losses but let's spark that and i think the world has heard a lot of the negative side of coven but i will tell you on the positive side of covet we have experienced probably the fastest and exponential increase of the digitalization of every life and of every business and when we look at the world and we look at investment when we look

at our portfolio of 170 companies around the world with i am every morning when i talk to our different ceos i'm blown away by the innovation of how everybody has digitalized their business unless i massively transform my business i am never going to be able to survive the pandemic has brought something that we said it was going to happen a few years from now the digitalization of the economy and it has accelerated so i think the world has changed forever and i think the world is never going to be the same the pandemic is going

to finish and the world is going to go back to normal and i say you're going to go you're going to go bankrupt if you think that way going forward we envision a mix that people can continue to work from home a lot of the time for the things that working in a focused way in your own space with the flexibility to also attend to family matters also it'll be helpful to bring more diversity to our workforce so that men also share on on the work at home much more and i think we need to

work a lot in most of the countries where we're present that's an issue and and i think working from home can help solve that matter as well so for all of those things we will maintain working from home as a real option possibility for everyone but we will be requiring also that a percentage of your time not just a percentage of your time but for certain things it's good that you come to the office every week and you know for team meetings for dynamics that require you to be there and what we're seeing a lot

of companies do i'll give an example of google google has a lot of employees that work across the bridge in brooklyn and those employees want to go to work but somebody like google they don't have an office in in brooklyn so those employees come they're allowed to come to where we work in brooklyn which is we've made it look like it's a google facility what people are scared is to get into public transportation to get into the subway to get into buses and all that but if people can find a way to work toward to

walk to work or just take one ride to work or take bicycle or take a bicycle to work people are dying to get back to work so i think i i think the future of working is not going to go hey we all work from home but companies are going to have to think a model in which the offices are closer to where their employees live plan like you are with coffee for the next two to three years one way you know one way or another because this is not one that hey there's a vaccine

and everybody gets vaccinated and goodbye covered and we and and world back to normal that's the way we at softbank are looking at the world and that's how we're making our investments we announced a partnership with um with uber in mexico which is quite successful in bringing also hundreds of thousands of customers onto our already very large bank in mexico we have other discussions on going with other big techs we announced in july an agreement with google to market a google bbva account in the us um other banks as well but we are one of

a very few set of large banks um that has announced that and and that's really a response to what you're describing so on top of the so our customers used to walk into the branch right so they would walk the street and walk into the branch and open their account or buy their product then they moved on to the digital channels uh some years ago and already a large percentage more than 60 percent of our of our clients are digital and and more than have our mobile users so they a lot a lot of the

new flow comes from our own digital channels now the movement is going into a third-party digital channels already that's happening and you know this better than me marcelo and we're just partnering there so that we can do a win-win we can provide the product uh and we can partner with big brands that have also the cloud the marketing cloud the the customer base to bringing new business for us so we see it as a as a way of growing and i think a lot of the banks are going to be out of business because the

fintech competition the big tech competition in our particular case we are one of a few uh one of a kind that i i think are doing the right things to be part of the landscape going forward forward as well yeah so in in from my side were big admirers of bbva and it fills me with a lot of pride that you see a spanish company in the us in many cases when i see your name in branches and in some place in the u.s that i've seen so i'm i'm i'm a huge admirer and i

love what you guys are doing i just think we're going to experience one of the most fascinating clashes where i believe a few banks that understand what's coming that can adapt to it i think we have an opportunity the epidemic is really an opportunity to uh to and one of the aspects we need to reset is precisely that of discrimination so and inclusion in all respects [Music] financial inclusion gender race from our from our side we're doing many things internally and also trying to do the same in society maybe one of the biggest initiatives marthello

that we have at bba that i'm super proud of is our uh microfinance foundation so i i am committed i am committed to helping discuss and being a hispanic in the u.s right and i haven't been blessed to to with what the jobs that i have and the companies and all that you know this is one of my personal commitments to to try to help and also my my partner my boss masa you know he's korean in japan so that's a different type of discrimination but i'll tell you two things that we're doing one is

i don't know if most people don't know but in the u.s there's about nine million families who don't have internet access at home people think of the us as this superpower and in many cases poverty in this country is pretty bad and then the problem is that 80 of them are either latinos or they're black so one thing that i started is i started the one million project in which we gave away 1 million computers with 1 million free internet access with the hope to get my competitors that in my in my other job as

sea of sprint uh to get my competitors to react and to help me what is called to to once and for all bridge the homework gap because we can fix to break it because kids cannot do homework at home and then now with the merger with t-mobile that we just did we made a commitment to give away 10 million free internet connections meaning we're going to eradicate that so that's going to be good for hispanics that's going to be good for blacks and then in the middle of this disaster where we were at protest we

had looting and all that softbank i opened what is called the softbank opportunity fund and it's a fund dedicated only to support black and latin entrepreneurs who didn't have access when i founded bright star which became the largest hispanic-owned company in the history of united states i didn't have access to venture capital i didn't have access to private equity it was really really hard and when i saw the numbers only 1.8 percent of all venture capital goes to hispanics and only one percent goes to blacks and we are much bigger part of the population so

i'm so proud we launched this we've already funded close to 10 businesses it's 100 million dollars it's a good start we have over 700 applications which is incredible so we're committed to helping at least in the us you know all the black and latino entrepreneurs and my goal is to expand that throughout the world so we can have a specific fund that can help communities that traditionally didn't have access and it's not a gift it's not a grant it's not a foundation you know we make money we're investing but we're giving the opportunity to entrepreneurs

who didn't have a chance so so we're and i think again both you and i are leaders of global companies we both have i guess the latin blood or hispanic blood and and we're both operating all over the world so i look forward to continue to see what you're doing with your foundation and if you see any opportunities in which we can get soft and to partner with bba we would love to to try to just make the world a better place and a world that's more equal so you can count on me for anything

that we can absolutely martello absolutely congratulations on on on the opportunity fund it sounds extremely exciting and i think there is plenty of room for um us to cooperate so really looking forward to hooking up on that well it's been so looking forward to meet you in presence in person thank you good luck guys that was amazing thank you so much for participating what profound insights in so many different sectors of so many different regions in a short space of time so thank you again so much carlos and marcelo for participating and folks that's a

wrap from us so back to you at the studio