Carlos Torres (BBVA): the lover of 'The Origin of Species' who shook up banking
The president of the Basque-born bank had Sabadell in his sights since he became president in 2019.
BarcelonaSurely the fans of the president of BBVA, Carlos Torres Vila (Salamanca, 1966), for The Origin of Species Charles Darwin's influence has prompted him to try to take control of Banc Sabadell. He tried it in 2020, a year after becoming president of the bank, where he had been CEO since 2015, and it didn't work out. Four years later, he's back, leading an intense 17-month offensive that the Catalan bank ultimately won.
Torres, guided by Darwin, believes that the stronger the species, the more likely it is to survive. That's why he didn't hesitate to shake up the banking industry to add a new player to BBVA, which had already swallowed up six of the ten Catalan savings banks. And in this long history of fruitless results, his main competitor, Santander, has ended up implicated. In the midst of a takeover bid, Sabadell, in one of its defensive moves of recent months, closed a deal with the bank led by Ana Patricia Botín to sell its British subsidiary, TSB.
Not long ago, despite publicly claiming the takeover bid was a success, he asserted that if it didn't go through, "it's no big deal." And that may have something to do with his notion of success, which he explained during a talk: "If you do what you can, you've already succeeded; the result is the same."
This banker, who studied at MIT, has been responsible for BBVA's digitalization. He joined the bank as head of strategy and, later, of the global digital banking area, one of BBVA's distinguishing features.
Interest in astronomy
But beyond technology, Torres is a banker who loves science, and especially astronomy. Looking through the telescope relaxes him. "There's nothing better, when you have, perhaps, a serious work mess, than spending a few hours looking at the deep sky and seeing that these problems have no relevance in cosmic terms," he explained at a conference. Professionally, he began in the 1990s at the North American consulting firm McKinsey, where he rose to partner in 1997. From 2002 to 2007, he was a director at Endesa, before joining the Biscayan bank.
