Dive Brief:
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BBVA is partnering with Spanish restaurant El Celler de Can Roca to sell the restaurant's products on Amazon, the Spanish bank announced in a blog post Thursday.
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The partnership, which includes selling a collection of products from the Michelin three-star restaurant's recycling project, will be used as a "learning experience" as BBVA prepares to eventually use the platform to sell its own digital products, the bank said.
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"The bank's intention is to move into offering banking products on the platform — an idea still to be fully explored," Cristóbal Baeza, a corporate communications executive for BBVA, said in a blog post.
Dive Insight:
BBVA's initial foray into e-commerce could signal an attempt to get a head start on what it thinks will be the latest product to land on Amazon's platform: financial services products.
"Amazon has not yet moved into selling financial services directly, and BBVA recognizes that financial institutions must adapt to this way of selling," Baeza wrote.
The bank said it believes "selling through Amazon would extend online sales opportunities, complementing the bank's proprietary digital channels."
The venture has a "double-pronged objective" that includes kick-starting BBVA's pilot project on the e-commerce giant's platform in addition to sharing its digital expertise with El Cellar, the bank said.
Long known as a digitally savvy bank, BBVA has partnered with fintechs such as Atom Bank, Holvi and SolarisBank, according to AltFi.
The bank, which said it already sells close to 60% of its products over digital channels, also owns U.S. digital bank Simple and Mexican payments group OpenPay.
BBVA's group executive chairman, Carlos Torres Vila, put tech companies squarely in his cross-hairs in October, telling an audience at the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas that "data is being hoarded by the companies that gather it, and we have to change that."
