BBVA Compass, the U.S. arm of the Spanish bank BBVA, has no designated innovation head. Instead, all innovation initiatives fall under the bank’s head of business development, José “Pepe” Olalla.

BBVA has more than 15 million mobile active users.

Olalla, who has been with BBVA since 1992, served as BBVA’s Chief Information Officer in Madrid before taking the position of leading the business development department for the bank’s U.S. operations. At BBVA Compass, Olalla oversees all innovation efforts as well as the marketing channels. He reports to the U.S. CEO and head of customer & client solutions of the holding company, and serves as liaison between the bank’s main office and its new digital business department in California.

Olalla focuses on a wide range of innovation areas, with the bank’s mobile app, high-tech branches and the ever-changing fintech flavor of the month, from AI to voice banking. How does he decide what to focus on?

“Profitability is the name of the game,” Olalla told Bank Innovation. “So we have to think through that lens. When a new technology emerges, the first questions we ask ourselves as team is why are we doing this? Is it because it’s fancy or is it because it is needed?”

When it comes to making that decision, Olalla pays close attention to most common transactions that the bank’s customers use on Compass’s digital platform.

“We rank these features, combine it with customer feedback, our own research and also take advantage of what BBVA Bank is doing in markets like Spain and Mexico,” he said.

Once, he’s pinpointed an area to work on, that’s when the real work begins.

With a team of in-house engineers, most of the digital features and new products are built by the bank’s internal engineering team. The bank might partner with third-party services for technology like data aggregation or core processing, but most of the “heavy lifting is done internally,” he said. “Of course, we believe in partnerships and we pursue those when necessary,” he added.

When it comes to the product, Olalla prefers to bring it to market as quickly as possible and then work retrospectively to tweak and improve it.

“We prefer to launch the minimum viable product with the basics, and then learn what needs to be added or improved from data gathered from customer usage and interaction,” he said. “This is why we have agile methodology, and our team has a lot of engineers and designers. Over the past two years, the goal has been to become more and more agile.”

Indeed, this is a tactic that is especially popular with digital-first banks. Nicolas Kopp, CEO of the US operation of challenger bank N26, previously told Bank Innovation, that “quicken time to market,” is one of the fundamental mandates of its engineering team.

To gauge whether Olalla and his team are meeting the mark, Olalla considers a few criteria, he said. The first one is NPS or net promoter score, which is defined as the willingness of the customer to recommend a product. Olalla also looks at digital engagement – the number of customers that use Compass’s digital channels as well as digital sales.

Right now, a big portion of Olalla’s focus is on the bank’s mobile app, he said. “This is where the customer is — they are used to doing everything on their phone, same goes for banking.”

So to keep in line with that Olalla and his team release a new version of the mobile app every month. Most recently, they added direct deposit. Olalla and his team are now working on incorporating an insurance offering though the app’s Green Button.

“We want the app to be more holistic,” he said.

When asked about the future of banking, Olalla pointed to data:

The future of banking is using data in a smart way within the bank, but also outside of the bank, being able to add services using machine learning to that data that are added value for the bank, but that ensures the owner the data is always the customer. As a bank, we will be able to access that data only by getting the consent of the customer. That consent is going to be key. That’s the future of banking. And as a bank you need the consumer’s trust to close that cycle.