Why has BBVA become the main sponsor of SDGC17?
"BBVA is doing a vast investing in design during the last years. Starting from the acquisition point and after building a cross-disciplinary design team, where we can cover within our team all our design needs from research to visual design. For us, service design is critical understanding and bridging user needs with the complexity of service logic inside of a centenary organization. And this is why we are supporting this SDN conference where we can learn from others and share our experience to scale service design."

How has service design impacted your company?
"For example, our mobile application in Spain was recognized as the best mobile banking app in the world this year 2017. We've designed it with service designers involved in the team from the early research phases to validation and piloting going by conceptualization. Service design is one of the latest disciplines that arrives at BBVA design department, and one of its most significant success is to move design beyond screens. Service designers allowed us to know the motivations and most profound thoughts of our clients about their relationship with banks, as well as the contexts of use of our services no matter where it takes place. The result of all this work enabled us to create solutions adapted to fit their needs, and this is something that no one else had fixed until now."

How do you see the impact of service design in the financial sector in the next five years?
"The financial sector has been working on customer experience for many years, as many other service providers from different industries had been doing. That's not anything new. What I think Service Design can provide is a balanced way to create solutions that fit people need dealing naturally with their emotions, without forgetting about the business side of the company. Furthermore, these solutions shouldn't be only applied to the final clients but also to reach the entire organization with its skills and needs.

In the next five years, I think the most advanced banks are going to take advantage of their traditional long-term customer relationship to satisfied customers needs under a life-cycle framework, instead of the current sales-driven product campaigns. Also, from a Service Design perspective, we should take care of people. The future is not going to be a simple digital tech-led transformation as many people are pointing, all this financial digitalization is about how we are going to deal with money, incomes, savings, etc. this isn't something new, it has been around historically no matters the technology behind value exchange."

What was your personal SDGC17 highlight?
"If you want to succeed as professional, you need to spend some time reflecting on what you have done and this 10th anniversary of the conference was an excellent opportunity to listen to many different approaches to the evolution of the relationship between service design, services, and its professionals. We had the chance to see many of the pioneers of the discipline on stage with a diverse range of trajectories and backgrounds and also some of them had shared how they look at the discipline in the coming years. I'm looking forward to confirming this future thinking in coming conferences."

What was your experience during SDGC17 with attendees?
"I've seen a diverse audience when it comes to geography. From a profile perspective it was an event with lots of people from consultancy companies and agencies. For me, coming from the client side, I felt a relevant interest in knowing what is happening within large organizations like BBVA, which are growing their internal teams with traditional profiles from agencies."