BBVA Exec: ‘I’d Love to Work with Uber’

LAS VEGAS – Everyone wants to work with “big deals,” said Chad Ballard, director of mobility and new digital business technologies at BBVA Compass. “I would always love to work with Uber, delivering financial services,” he said during the Retail Banking 2016 conference yesterday.

The point that Ballard was making, though, did not apply to BBVA and Uber specifically. “I mean everyone wants to work with big incumbents, like Google, and Amazon or Uber, but our theory is that you can get as much value from working with smaller fintech companies, and getting them off the ground with their products.”

When looking at the recent trends in fintech and digitization, BBVA applies an “open way to bank” strategy. “For us, it is to bring the age of opportunity to everyone, and to be able to pursue new digital business, also through our open API policy,” Ballard said.

Ballard did not announce of any future plans of partnering with Uber for financing, but an existing Uber partner, Westlake Financial Services, said that the relationship with the rideshare giant is actually dying out.

“They’ve launched their own financing channel, but besides that, because of that partnership we couldn’t do business with other rideshare companies,” Westlake’s president Ian Anderson told Auto Finance News. “It was an awesome partnership, because we learned so much about the space.”

Westlake’s financing volume to Uber has dropped to less than 100 deals per month recently, from 200 deals previously, Anderson told AFN separately.