Spanish sensibility

BBVA's global head of operational risk, Jordi Garcia, takes a pragmatic, hands-on approach to managing the Spanish bank's op risk. Duncan Wood talks to this veteran of the industry about the unique quality of Spanish loss data, Basel II and life at the op risk coalface

Spanish banks are different. Jordi Garcia, global head of operational risk at BBVA in Madrid, always suspected that to be true - now he can prove it. His hunch was that the big Spanish institutions are more focused on retail and commercial banking business than their peers in other countries, which often have large investment banking divisions - and the outsized risks that go with them. More importantly, Spain's banks have standardised around 20 of the most common retail banking procedures, from