BBVA has partnered with Bloomberg to enable its institutional clients to build bespoke structured products and calculate pricing in real-time in a fully automated fashion via Bloomberg's Derivatives Library (DLIB), which makes part of Bloomberg Professional service, the company's financial data and information platform.

The initiative is "fully aligned" with the Spanish bank's strategy to position itself as an agile organization that captures fast business from the private banking segment, according to Emilio Sainz de Baranda (pictured), global head of equity derivatives sales at BBVA. "This partnership with Bloomberg helped shorten the time it takes to structure and price deals from hours to a matter of seconds, making it easier for our clients to use BBVA as their dealer of choice for structured investments," said Sainz de Baranda.

Going forward BBVA's institutional clients will be able to execute deals based on tradeable prices delivered to BBVA's dealer page on the Bloomberg Terminal. In addition to delivering structured products pricing in real-time, DLIB provides tools for the derivatives workflow, from idea generation and market-data analysis to structuring and pricing of new products, using standard templates or advanced scripting capabilities which are supported by LexiFi's financial contract description language, MLFI (Modeling Language for Finance).

The new solution will provide both parties of a deal with clarity into such deal's characteristics and gives BBVA's buy-side customers back-testing capabilities and product life-cycle management.

BBVA's move makes part of a wider digital transformation strategy which will streamline a number of functions. Bloomberg's DLIB automated pricing tool will eliminate human intervention to calculate and provide BBVA's customers with a firm price.

The Spanish bank is seeking to leverage its technology platform via Bloomberg's DLIB infrastructure, community of users and data to make customer's workflow easier to manage. The bank said in a statement that through a fast implementation of this solution, 'BBVA has established a strategic advantage over other market participants'.

Bloomberg DLIB gives institutional investors access to a library of preexisting and custom deal templates for structuring equity, FX, credit and interest rate derivatives contracts with desired characteristics. Users can work-up theoretical pricing and analyze the risk of deals, including exotic and hybrid payoffs, on the Bloomberg Terminal when they are 'Bloomberg Anywhere' subscribers.

Bloomberg's wealth of market data and analytics supports diverse investment strategies and cater to various risk and reward profiles, according to Karim Faraj, head of front-office derivatives products at Bloomberg.

"Our work with BBVA is another example of Bloomberg's commitment to facilitating the workflow between the sell-side and the buy-side; from idea generation, to pre-trade, execution and post trade operations," said Faraj. "Structured products investors can use Bloomberg for more of their workflow - from structuring deals, to pricing them, to calculating risk on an ongoing basis."

BBVA has been a top three provider of structured products in Spain’s retail market, according to SRP data. The Spanish bank is also an active issuer as well as bond and derivatives provider in other markets such as Portugal, France, the UK and a number of Latin American countries including Mexico, Peru, Chile and Argentina.

BBVA has currently 461 live structured products across jurisdictions including 83 in Spain, 360 in Mexico, 15 in Portugal, two in Chile and one in the UK.

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