Spanish bank offers one-stop shops to meet immigrants’ financial needs as well as helping with finding jobs and calling home: the Dinero Express model

A Spanish bank is offering an innovative chain of one-stop shops called Dinero Express that is designed to meet both financial and non-financial needs of immigrants and is immigrant-friendly both in terms of its staffing and hours of service. Dinero Express, started in 2005, represents a new business model that has not previously existed in Spain or elsewhere in Europe.

BBVA Grupa plans to open 100 Dinero Express outlets by the end of 2006. Each outlet is open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. including weekends, recognizing time differences between immigrants and their families, and is staffed by immigrants. Dinero Express offers services including money transfers, loans, insurance, performance bonds for rental contracts, cards, and mortgages, and non-financial services such as guidance, a database of jobs, travel arrangements, and listings of available accommodation and grants.

Dinero Express offers immigrants subsidized phone calls home at 5 cents a minute and recently installed phone cabins with two stools and two receivers to allow group conversations. It also has a deal with DHL to send packages and an arrangement with the employment agency Adecco to help immigrants find jobs (46% of those who left their resumes with Dinero Express found jobs).

Dinero Express allows almost instant money transfer from country to country. For example, Oscar Rojas, who emigrated to Spain five years ago from Colombia, walked into his local Dinero Express branch in Madrid on Monday, Nov. 27, at 10:30 a.m. and fed €202 into a specially adapted automated teller machine. Within 15 minutes, the Colombian peso equivalent was available for his wife to draw on through a bank’s ATM in his home town. Rojas, who is employed doing odd jobs for a fruit company, has just had his residence permit renewed and said the next step was to buy an apartment and bring over his family.

A study by the Spanish business school Instituto de Empresa shows that in the first two years, immigrants are focused on money transfers and calls home. In the next three years, they look for consumer credit, and after five years, for the mortgages and car loans that are more profitable for banks. Facilitating money transfers helps create long-term relationships between bank and immigrant. An estimated four million immigrants, mainly from Latin America, North Africa and some Eastern European countries, now live in Spain and in 2006, they will send an estimated €5.5 billion to their families, said Miguel Ángel Muñoz, the head of immigrant banking in Spain for BBVA.

BBVA says it is writing a story of success in Spain, in Mexico and in many other Latin-American countries, with a corporate culture based on integrity, transparency and the quality of customer care. “Against a backdrop of profound change in technology and society, we have taken up the challenge of anticipating the future; of re-inventing the role of a financial group and adapting it to new conditions and requirements,” says BBVA.

BBVA has a specific website for Dinero Express. This story is compiled from information on the BBVA website, and a Dec. 18, 2006 article by Karina Robinson of The Banker, entitled “Banking matters: banks start targeting the immigrant market”, published in the International Herald Tribune. The Banker is the journal of record for the investment, retail and commercial banking sectors.

 


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