Interview by Alberto Aranda, text by Jordi Martínez and photographs by Antonio Bouzas.
“It is no longer enough to be neutral. We have to build a business model that helps regenerate.”
We meet Luis at a spot in the fishermen’s port of A Coruña. The day started with rain, but the unpredictable weather of the Galician capital decides to give us a break in the form of a sunny morning. We sit at the MOP Foundation center, which repurposes an old cement silo in Catro and, that month, was hosting a Helmut Newton exhibition. He is accompanied by Jorge Mahía, his executive director, whose approachable nature – sadly uncommon for someone in his position – says a lot about what MOP aims to be and about the person who decided to found it.
Luis likes to have his coffee with a slice of tortilla. He is a helpful person, the kind who remembers everyone’s name. The first thing that catches our attention is his ability to explain tremendously complex concepts in a simple way without having to oversimplify them. A very necessary skill for his job, among many others, is explaining a process that recycles plastic every time you pay and rewards you for going out for a run.
According to him, his professional career involves a lot of chance. After spending a while chatting about purpose, transparency, and the difference between “having cash on hand” and “withdrawing money,” if there is one thing that becomes clear, it’s that he has worked hard to make sure luck is on his side.
A.A.
Let’s start by talking about B100, a very special kind of bank. What sets you apart from a conventional bank?
L.F.
The difference with B100 is that it’s an integral model. Healthy banking isn’t just having an account with certain financial characteristics; it’s a complete model: the way you treat your employees and your users, the way you measure the impact of your productive activity on the environment, etc. That’s the main difference.
We are in a phase of civilization, of history, in which it’s no longer enough to be neutral—you have to create a world that helps regenerate. I often bring it down to a domestic example: in your own home, it’s not enough to avoid making a mess; you have to clean.
A.A.
And how does that translate into the financial products you offer?
L.F.
We know that financial activity doesn’t only affect money—it can have a broader impact—and that’s why we have developed two very distinctive financial products.
The first is a debit card that removes plastic every time you pay (B100 allocates 25% of the income from its “Pay to Save” cards to a plastic collection project).
On the other hand, we have a product that offers you a financial reward if you meet a health challenge. It’s an extra interest-bearing account into which you can only deposit money if you meet a very simple health goal. Right now it’s based on steps, but very soon there will be new healthy savings methods—and not just for physical health—that will allow you to save more.
We all have an interest in our customers being healthy. If we can do it, why wouldn’t we help you take a few more steps, walk or run a little more, given that we pay you a greater reward?
A.A.
What have been the main hesitations and obstacles you have encountered, both inside and outside the company?
L.F.
B100 is a project of ABANCA; it would be impossible to build it from scratch, and we’ve had a lot of support from the beginning. But creating a digital bank is much more complex than even those of us within the sector could imagine.
Explaining a product like “Pay to Save” is not easy, and the regulatory side has perhaps been one of our biggest challenges. In that respect we are very orthodox—we don’t want to take any risks, and we know that regulation always has a greater purpose, which is to protect our users. We have had many conversations with various experts and with Autocontrol to find out how to communicate it properly. When you launch an innovative product in such a regulated market, you have to accept that there will be a very important amount of work involved.
A.A.
Beyond regulation, there is a widespread notion that the banking sector prioritizes constant growth and shareholders’ profits over user wellbeing and environmental impact. Your proposal, in that sense, differs sharply from most of your competitors. How do you address the challenge of changing consumers’ perception—not just of a brand, but of an entire sector?
L.F.
The challenge is enormous. Everything that happened in 2007, 2008 and even through 2013 still influences how people view banks, and no product design or campaign is going to fix that overnight. Purpose has to be present in every interaction with a client, in every decision you make—even at product level—to build a healthy relationship.
In our app, for example, we display the amount of plastic collected right next to your account balance. We wanted to be honest about that; we didn’t make an initial purchase of plastic so that the first customers would see tons of plastic collected in the counter. The first customers saw that the plastic collected by the community was 50 or 40 or even fewer kilos (he laughs). It’s in the day-to-day life when the brand can demonstrate its values, and it’s something that takes time and transparency—you can’t achieve it with giant headlines that say “we’re honest.”
We are making an effort to be more transparent and credible, and to normalize a relationship that breaks with the usual company–client hierarchy in the banking sector. It’s something we have deeply internalized since building the bank: we can’t say “cash availability” if we could just say “withdraw money.” It’s as simple and yet as complex as that.
A.A.
You talk about taking the impact on the environment into account, about regenerating instead of simply being neutral, or about protecting users as key elements in building your project. On a global level, what role or value do you think brands, agencies and companies have in society?
L.F.
The responsibility of companies is to live up to what society demands, what customers ask for. If we don’t take our users’ demands into account, it’s going to be much more complicated. In the case of B100, we believe there are users who, when they have to choose among all the banks in Spain or among all the cards they can use to pay for a coffee, will appreciate that someone picks up plastic from the ocean every time they pay for that coffee at no cost to them—because it’s the bank that gives up part of its income to make it happen.
If we look back not 20 or 15 years, but five, we see that the companies with the greatest ability to read what customers are asking for are the most prosperous, the ones that have grown the most. And those that haven’t, the opposite.
A.A.
What would you tell your past self, Luis—something you wish you’d known back then?
L.F.
I would simply tell my past self, “Relax—everything will turn out fine.” I worry a lot, and doubts and fears always creep in. I would also remind him never to lose sight of the medium- and long‑term. And I’d tell him to trust not only in himself but in the people around him; often the team knows more than you do.
A.A.
From reflecting on your past to looking at future companies—where do you think brands are heading?
L.F.
I’d like to see the same values I just spoke about for people and for myself reflected in companies. I’d love to see businesses making decisions with a medium- and long‑term perspective, both for their own operations and for their customers. Surviving a week is very different from surviving a year, ten years or a hundred. In the future, I hope every decision we make will move toward a regenerative model and be capable of creating prosperity for users. It’s not just about saying that we’ll do this or that one day, but about integrating regeneration into the way we do things.
“In the future, I would love to see companies making decisions with the medium and long term in mind, both for their business and their clients.”
For our part, we don’t know if we’ll make it to one hundred years, but we return home with the certainty that, however many years we have, we want to walk them surrounded by people like Luis and projects like B100.
