Torres (BBVA) claims the Spanish mortgage market: "Tremendously competitive"

SantanderThe chairman of BBVA, Carlos Torres, has defended the Spanish mortgage market less than a week after the National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) opened disciplinary proceedings against the six large Ibex-35 banks – including BBVA – for mortgage interest rates.

"In Spain we have a tremendously competitive market, where customers have extraordinary financing conditions," Torres assured this Monday at the summer course of the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo (UIMP) and the Association of Journalists of Economic Information (APIE) in Santander.

The CNMC is investigating whether BBVA, along with CaixaBank, Sabadell, Unicaja, Bankinter, and Banco Santander, have conditioned the granting of fixed-rate mortgages with public statements about their future commercial policy. Torres denied this: "At BBVA, we have a firm commitment to compliance with the rules, and at all times we have acted correctly".

The chairman of the Basque entity assured that the commercial policy of banks "does not depend on what is said in press conferences", but "on the creation of value and the customer", and recalled that the competition investigation "is in its early stages". He went a step further and estimated that Spain "is third in the Union with the lowest rates", which, according to him, "shows the good conditions that mortgage customers have in Spain".

When asked by journalists about possible actions by political forces in this area, Torres warned that "it is not advisable to have interventions in markets that are already working well". "It is counterproductive," he stressed.

AI, "positive" for employment

The BBVA president has argued that artificial intelligence will have a "positive impact on human employment", in the face of social concern that it could lead to job destruction. However, he agreed that "employment will be transformed" and, in this context, opined that "surely the biggest challenge will be managing change" so that "no one is left behind".

In fact, Torres defended that AI "can become one of the most powerful tools" to increase Spanish productivity which, according to him, continues to be the great pending issue. "GDP has grown the same as the number of employed people. That is, GDP per capita has barely increased in recent years", he lamented, despite the "notable growth capacity" of the state's economy.