LOFTY aims
Banco BiG hopes to disrupt the Spanish market by offering top-class investment and saving solutions.
Banco BiG, founded in Portugal, started operations in Spain in 2020. How has the bank developed this year?
As mentioned in our launch communication to the market in November 2020, BiG’s objective in the Spanish market is to provide best-in-class investment and saving solutions. Our digital focus centered on providing clients with a variety of different solutions tailored to each person’s specific risk tolerance helps us to satisfy their various needs. Despite having started in a challenging environment with the advent of COVID-19, given that the bank was created with a focus on combining professional customer service from our office in Madrid aided by technology, we believe the current environment is one that favors our type of setup—digitally based with human support when needed.
What sets BiG apart from other banks?
Where we attempt to set BiG apart is our absolute focus on investment and savings solutions. We are not a universal bank, but rather a specialized bank where our sole preoccupation is to assist our clients with their investment and savings decisions. Banco BiG is the bank you go to to save and invest, with more than 20 years of experience serving customers and creating solutions. We have the ambition to be become a reference in the savings and investment segment in Spain. Each person has certain objectives and a certain lifestyle. Consequently, we aim to be their financial partner so that clients have that peace of mind and can plan their future, managing their financial lives.
The bank offers two investment platforms: Simple Trading and Advanced Trading. Can you elaborate on their main characteristics?
When establishing our investment offering, we quickly understood that there are two different types of investor; traders and investors. While the former has very demanding needs regarding trading platform functionalities such as graphic/technical analysis setups, real-time quotes, and multiple order types, among others, the investor prefers non-levered products such as mutual funds and stock, long-term orientated search functions, and investment content. Therefore, we have offered two different environments. One is not better than the other, they are just more appealing to traders or investors.
Other banks talk about the difficulty of finding good talent and retaining it. How do you manage to attract and retain talent?
While we believe we have good technology and products, our people make the difference. When dealing with people’s life savings, we believe it is important to have a professional and qualified staff to ensure customer satisfaction. Because of this belief, we are focused on ensuring our team in Spain is motivated to help serve our customers. We have an interesting project in Spain; to launch a bank that we hope to become a reference in the investing and savings segment. While it is a new bank in the market, it is aided by the over 20 years of experience this business has in other geographies. Our staff in Spain has joined to help BiG build this bank, an opportunity that is not very common, to be able to shape the future of the investment and savings offering in Spain. A key part of ensuring retention is to give responsibility to our people to contribute from day one and be outcome orientated in a structure that has a solid foundation and which motivated and driven people with integrity can add to.
What are Banco BiG’s goals for 2022?
We want to build on our strong beginning in the Spanish market and continue to expand our offering to provide investment advisory and discretionary managed accounts. This will go a long way to complete our investment and savings offering. Overall, we hope to contribute to enhance financial literacy amongst the Spanish population, raising awareness regarding the need to invest and save. By providing education around investing, our objective is to grow our client base through thought leadership and solutions that help solve client challenges.