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Centre for innovation

For Bankinter, innovation is not just having ideas, but translating them into new business avenues and anticipating major shifts in markets and society.

In the past few years major technology companies, start-ups with novel services such as crowdfunding, mobile wallets and money transfer, have become competitors of traditional banks.

In our DNA. Since its creation, the Centre for Innovation has been firmly committed to being a breakaway model of contribution and commitment to society. To this end, it works to seek out knowledge networks that are at the forefront of new trends, and which promote innovation in a tangible way and rigorously measure their results. Bankinter sees innovation
as the ability to generate value in a different way, and believes the key to innovation is not just having ideas but being able to translate those ideas into new avenues of business that transform established models.

Bankinter's Centre for Innovation studies existing business models, looking for ways to reorient them so as to be able to anticipate and take advantage of the major changes that the financial sector and society in general are bound to undergo in the next few years.

Banks have seen recently how their traditional business models have come under pressure from major technology players such as Apple and Google who little by little have become their competitors. But these are not the only new players. Crowdfunding websites, apps for making payments via mobile phones and transferring money among users are also competing with the banks, moving in on areas previously occupied by traditional banking. Of all these, those doing most to change the rules of the game for banking are those that affect customer relations. In order to respond to all these new challenges, Bankinter has its Centre for Innovation.

Bankinter's innovation strategy seeks to detect new business models and opportunities suitable for the Bank, with a degree of independence from it. To this end:

  • It develops new products for the Bank's existing customers or for potential ones.
  • It seeks new customers to whom existing products can be sold, sometimes developing alternative relational channels.

The objective is for every new business to be profitable and sustainable over time, but using a more streamlined structure capable of responding rapidly to opportunities that arise at any given time.

The ultimate aim of the Centre for Innovation is to develop products and services that customers will value as differentiating elements, and for this in turn to translate into additional revenue for the Bank.

The Centre for Innovation also analyses, in collaboration with the areas involved, certain problems or challenges of interest and works on them to find a solution from a perspective of innovation.

The Bank's culture of innovation

Disseminating innovation throughout the organisation. In seeking networks of knowledge that will anticipate new trends and enable it to promote innovation in tangible form, Bankinter applies a method which is designed to disseminate innovation throughout the various areas of the Bank.

In an initial phase, this method aims to encourage the generation of ideas. In order to identify them, Bankinter relies on:

  • Its employees. One of the main sources of generation of ideas is to be found in the Bank's professionals who share their experiences and initiatives. In this regard, a website is in place which works as a mailbox for coordinating, compiling and channelling employees' contributions to innovation.
  • The Bankinter Foundation for Innovation. Contact with the best professionals from highly diverse disciplines, through the think tank FTF (Future Trends Forum), provides valuable cutting-edge information, first-hand.
  • Entrepreneurs' hub. The hub enables the Bank to get to know talent from businesses and markets other than banking and to use these businesses as service providers or even invest in them.
  • Major technology firms. Lastly, close relations with companies such as Telefónica, IBM and Cisco, and with banks from other countries, educational institutions and prestigious business schools, provide direct contact with many of the top-level trends in the most technologically advanced sectors.

Once this start-up and generation phase has been completed, the ideas are filtered through funnels called ‘Innovation Programmes’, which detect the subjects in which the Bank is most interested, always providing they are in line with its strategy. In other words that they help to generate a coherent discourse on innovation. This is crucial in order for these initiatives to to have an impact on society and to materialise in the Bank's profit and loss account, with an approach focused more on revenue growth than
on cost saving.

The innovation programmes can be classified into:

  • Banking digitisation.
  • Mobile payments and wallets.
  • New distribution channels

The indispensable culture of innovation
What makes Bankinter an innovating institution? The answer can be summed up in one word: culture. There are three aspects that take it beyond enthusiasm for new ideas
and ensure sustained growth of innovation.
The first one is its openness and receptiveness to new initiatives, encouraging people to present new ideas, to defend them and to incorporate them into the business model. The second one is the culture of experimentation. Bankinter is not afraid to ask its customers to try out new ideas. And lastly, its humility in accepting them, whether they come from people involved in
the Bank or from unrelated parties.
Advances, incremental changes, new products, new services and even radically different ways of doing business can arise from anywhere, and is there is a culture of innovation, they will arise continuously. If employees' in-house debates centre on innovation and new ideas arise in any conversation, their culture will be imbued with innovation and the chances of success will increase.

Notable projects

Coinc, which has become Spain's leading social saving portal, combines the advantages of the traditional bank savings format with the simplicity of being 100% online.

With the Mobile Virtual Card, Bankinter became the first bank in the world to market a system which generates a single-use card.

Changing the Spanish banking sector. Resulting from all the challenges taken up by the Centre for Innovation, two particular projects stood out in 2014: the coinc.es savings portal, which consolidated its position on the Spanish banking scene as one of the most notable innovation plays in online banking; and the Mobile Virtual Card, with which Bankinter has developed a solution that counts as world first, enabling its customers to make payments using their mobile phones.

Coinc

This savings portal, an alternative to the bank, with its own brand, has become, since its creation in July 2012, the most innovative and successful national model of Spanish banking, both in numbers and results and in design and development. With the aim of stimulating its users' savings by establishing specific targets, Coinc remunerates these savings, but it also
offers other benefits by means of agreements with other service providers and product suppliers, such as Amazon.

To access the service, users need only register with the portal, which takes just a few minutes, then set their targets and start saving. Coinc's easy registration process, 100% online, with no exchange of paper documents, is one of the keys to this portal's success.

Coinc supports users by helping them draw up plans to reach particular individual or group goals. For example, customers can share joint initiatives with friends and relations, such as a trip, a gift or even donations to any charitable cause, which also makes Coinc the first social savings portal.

The advantages of the traditional bank savings format, such as the safety and profitability of the account, are combined with the simplicity and total virtuality of the Internet and the social networks.

Coinc has basically attracted people who are active on the Internet, aged between 25 and 45, who have discovered that this portal offers them a simple and fun way of saving. At the
end of 2014, Coinc had 60,583 registered users, 41,047 of whom were customers of the Bank. At the same time, balances deposited reached €684 million.

Go to Coinc website

Mobile Virtual Card

Constantly evolving and innovating, Bankinter launched its mobile phone payment system, a pioneering initiative in Spain, in September 2014. The Mobile Virtual Card is an innovative system allowing customers to use their mobile phones to generate, securely and instantaneously, a single-use credit or debit card with which to make payments in merchant outlets, restaurants or filling stations, or to make purchases from online stores.

Customers need only download an application from an Apps store to their smartphone and register on the Bank's website in order to activate the application on their mobile phone. In just a
few minutes, the mobile phone is authorised as a means of payment, and from then on the customer can use his mobile phone to make payments with a degree of ease and security very similar to that of the conventional plastic card.

With the Mobile Virtual Card, Bankinter has become the first bank in the world to market a solution of this kind, i.e. 100% software. Unlike other existing solutions, it allows payments to be made even if there is no mobile coverage, enabling it to be used anywhere, including abroad.

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Equity, ratios and Bankinter shares
Technological milestones in 2014

Centre for innovation

For Bankinter, innovation is not just having ideas, but translating them into new business avenues and anticipating major shifts in markets and society.

In the past few years major technology companies, start-ups with novel services such as crowdfunding, mobile wallets and money transfer, have become competitors of traditional banks.

In our DNA. Since its creation, the Centre for Innovation has been firmly committed to being a breakaway model of contribution and commitment to society. To this end, it works to seek out knowledge networks that are at the forefront of new trends, and which promote innovation in a tangible way and rigorously measure their results. Bankinter sees innovation
as the ability to generate value in a different way, and believes the key to innovation is not just having ideas but being able to translate those ideas into new avenues of business that transform established models.

Bankinter's Centre for Innovation studies existing business models, looking for ways to reorient them so as to be able to anticipate and take advantage of the major changes that the financial sector and society in general are bound to undergo in the next few years.

Banks have seen recently how their traditional business models have come under pressure from major technology players such as Apple and Google who little by little have become their competitors. But these are not the only new players. Crowdfunding websites, apps for making payments via mobile phones and transferring money among users are also competing with the banks, moving in on areas previously occupied by traditional banking. Of all these, those doing most to change the rules of the game for banking are those that affect customer relations. In order to respond to all these new challenges, Bankinter has its Centre for Innovation.

Bankinter's innovation strategy seeks to detect new business models and opportunities suitable for the Bank, with a degree of independence from it. To this end:

  • It develops new products for the Bank's existing customers or for potential ones.
  • It seeks new customers to whom existing products can be sold, sometimes developing alternative relational channels.

The objective is for every new business to be profitable and sustainable over time, but using a more streamlined structure capable of responding rapidly to opportunities that arise at any given time.

The ultimate aim of the Centre for Innovation is to develop products and services that customers will value as differentiating elements, and for this in turn to translate into additional revenue for the Bank.

The Centre for Innovation also analyses, in collaboration with the areas involved, certain problems or challenges of interest and works on them to find a solution from a perspective of innovation.

The Bank's culture of innovation

Disseminating innovation throughout the organisation. In seeking networks of knowledge that will anticipate new trends and enable it to promote innovation in tangible form, Bankinter applies a method which is designed to disseminate innovation throughout the various areas of the Bank.

In an initial phase, this method aims to encourage the generation of ideas. In order to identify them, Bankinter relies on:

  • Its employees. One of the main sources of generation of ideas is to be found in the Bank's professionals who share their experiences and initiatives. In this regard, a website is in place which works as a mailbox for coordinating, compiling and channelling employees' contributions to innovation.
  • The Bankinter Foundation for Innovation. Contact with the best professionals from highly diverse disciplines, through the think tank FTF (Future Trends Forum), provides valuable cutting-edge information, first-hand.
  • Entrepreneurs' hub. The hub enables the Bank to get to know talent from businesses and markets other than banking and to use these businesses as service providers or even invest in them.
  • Major technology firms. Lastly, close relations with companies such as Telefónica, IBM and Cisco, and with banks from other countries, educational institutions and prestigious business schools, provide direct contact with many of the top-level trends in the most technologically advanced sectors.

Once this start-up and generation phase has been completed, the ideas are filtered through funnels called ‘Innovation Programmes’, which detect the subjects in which the Bank is most interested, always providing they are in line with its strategy. In other words that they help to generate a coherent discourse on innovation. This is crucial in order for these initiatives to to have an impact on society and to materialise in the Bank's profit and loss account, with an approach focused more on revenue growth than
on cost saving.

The innovation programmes can be classified into:

  • Banking digitisation.
  • Mobile payments and wallets.
  • New distribution channels

The indispensable culture of innovation
What makes Bankinter an innovating institution? The answer can be summed up in one word: culture. There are three aspects that take it beyond enthusiasm for new ideas
and ensure sustained growth of innovation.
The first one is its openness and receptiveness to new initiatives, encouraging people to present new ideas, to defend them and to incorporate them into the business model. The second one is the culture of experimentation. Bankinter is not afraid to ask its customers to try out new ideas. And lastly, its humility in accepting them, whether they come from people involved in
the Bank or from unrelated parties.
Advances, incremental changes, new products, new services and even radically different ways of doing business can arise from anywhere, and is there is a culture of innovation, they will arise continuously. If employees' in-house debates centre on innovation and new ideas arise in any conversation, their culture will be imbued with innovation and the chances of success will increase.

Notable projects

Coinc, which has become Spain's leading social saving portal, combines the advantages of the traditional bank savings format with the simplicity of being 100% online.

With the Mobile Virtual Card, Bankinter became the first bank in the world to market a system which generates a single-use card.

Changing the Spanish banking sector. Resulting from all the challenges taken up by the Centre for Innovation, two particular projects stood out in 2014: the coinc.es savings portal, which consolidated its position on the Spanish banking scene as one of the most notable innovation plays in online banking; and the Mobile Virtual Card, with which Bankinter has developed a solution that counts as world first, enabling its customers to make payments using their mobile phones.

Coinc

This savings portal, an alternative to the bank, with its own brand, has become, since its creation in July 2012, the most innovative and successful national model of Spanish banking, both in numbers and results and in design and development. With the aim of stimulating its users' savings by establishing specific targets, Coinc remunerates these savings, but it also
offers other benefits by means of agreements with other service providers and product suppliers, such as Amazon.

To access the service, users need only register with the portal, which takes just a few minutes, then set their targets and start saving. Coinc's easy registration process, 100% online, with no exchange of paper documents, is one of the keys to this portal's success.

Coinc supports users by helping them draw up plans to reach particular individual or group goals. For example, customers can share joint initiatives with friends and relations, such as a trip, a gift or even donations to any charitable cause, which also makes Coinc the first social savings portal.

The advantages of the traditional bank savings format, such as the safety and profitability of the account, are combined with the simplicity and total virtuality of the Internet and the social networks.

Coinc has basically attracted people who are active on the Internet, aged between 25 and 45, who have discovered that this portal offers them a simple and fun way of saving. At the
end of 2014, Coinc had 60,583 registered users, 41,047 of whom were customers of the Bank. At the same time, balances deposited reached €684 million.

Go to Coinc website

Mobile Virtual Card

Constantly evolving and innovating, Bankinter launched its mobile phone payment system, a pioneering initiative in Spain, in September 2014. The Mobile Virtual Card is an innovative system allowing customers to use their mobile phones to generate, securely and instantaneously, a single-use credit or debit card with which to make payments in merchant outlets, restaurants or filling stations, or to make purchases from online stores.

Customers need only download an application from an Apps store to their smartphone and register on the Bank's website in order to activate the application on their mobile phone. In just a
few minutes, the mobile phone is authorised as a means of payment, and from then on the customer can use his mobile phone to make payments with a degree of ease and security very similar to that of the conventional plastic card.

With the Mobile Virtual Card, Bankinter has become the first bank in the world to market a solution of this kind, i.e. 100% software. Unlike other existing solutions, it allows payments to be made even if there is no mobile coverage, enabling it to be used anywhere, including abroad.