BANCO BILBAO VIZCAYA ARGENTARIA SA*

Their core work

BBVA is one of Spain's largest multinational banking groups, headquartered in Bilbao. In the H2020 context, BBVA contributed domain expertise in data privacy, secure cloud computing, and cybersecurity — areas critical to financial services. Their participation spans privacy-preserving technologies for sensitive financial data processing and European cybersecurity competence-building, reflecting a bank's operational need to protect transactions and customer data at scale.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

BBVA's early H2020 involvement (2015-2017) centered on technical privacy and security challenges: homomorphic encryption, confidentiality in cloud computing, and security-by-design — problems a major bank faces daily. Their later participation (2019-2022) shifted toward cybersecurity governance, certification frameworks, and workforce training, suggesting a move from solving specific technical problems to shaping the broader European cybersecurity ecosystem and talent pipeline.

BBVA is moving from consuming security R&D to actively shaping European cybersecurity standards and workforce development, making them a valuable end-user voice in future security-focused consortia.

How they like to work

BBVA has never coordinated an H2020 project — they participate as a partner or third party, contributing real-world banking use cases and domain requirements rather than leading research. With 94 unique partners across 26 countries from just 3 projects, their network is wide because they joined large-scale consortia (CyberSec4Europe alone is a massive network). This is typical of large corporates who bring industry validation and pilot environments rather than research capacity.

Despite only 3 projects, BBVA has been exposed to 94 unique partners across 26 countries, largely through the large CyberSec4Europe consortium. Their network is broad but shallow — wide European reach without deep repeated partnerships.

What sets them apart

BBVA brings something rare to research consortia: a top-tier European bank willing to serve as a real-world testbed for privacy, encryption, and cybersecurity solutions. Financial services is one of the most demanding environments for data protection, so BBVA's involvement validates that research outputs can meet industry-grade security requirements. For consortium builders, having a major bank as an end-user partner strengthens both the impact case and the exploitation plan.

Highlights from their portfolio

• CyberSec4Europe
  A flagship EU cybersecurity competence network — BBVA's only funded project (EUR 155K), placing the bank within Europe's core cyber governance initiative.
• WITDOM
  Focused on homomorphic encryption and privacy in non-trusted environments — directly applicable to banking's cloud security challenges, an unusual and technically deep topic for a bank to engage in.