Barcelona is immersed in a league to reaffirm its positioning as a technological and entrepreneurial hub. Now, the financial sector also wants to play this game. The Barcelona Finance Cluster (BFC) is working with this objective, seeking to articulate a collaboration network between companies, institutions, and knowledge centers to strengthen the sector's competitiveness and consolidate Barcelona as one of the great financial centers of Southern Europe.
The cluster, which began to articulate a year ago, has been operating with a consolidated structure since July, with Alejandro Utrera as manager, and with Carme Hortalà as president. Since then, the entity has been defining its roadmap with the aim of becoming a space for strategic cooperation among actors who have often operated in isolation or even as competitors.
With this purpose, it seeks to change this logic and go from being competitors to being collaborators in favor of a more solid and articulated financial ecosystem. "The cluster's objective is to create a collaboration network among the different agents of the financial ecosystem," highlights Utrera. To achieve this, the BFC wants to integrate organizations that represent the entire value chain of the sector: from banks and insurers to fintech, including consultancies specialized in sustainable finance, asset management companies, venture capital and private equity funds, technology centers, and even training institutions.
From this wide range, the cluster already has 45 members, representing approximately 45% of the Catalan financial business. The sector, as a whole, is made up of some 650 companies, with a global turnover of about 48,000 million euros and more than 104,000 workers, a dimension that demonstrates its structural weight within the Catalan economy.
With the cluster, the ambition is to position this entire diverse financial ecosystem looking in the same direction. And it is that, "in many sectors, when the most competitive companies begin to collaborate in certain areas, the system becomes more sophisticated and productive," emphasizes Utrera; without competition disappearing, but seeking points of collaboration where sharing knowledge can generate joint value.
Looking ahead to the coming years, the cluster plans to expand its associative base to between 60 and 70 members, with the aim of completing this entire value chain of the financial sector. The philosophy is to keep the doors open to both large corporations and emerging companies with innovative proposals. However, "size is not the decisive factor; what counts is the ability to add value."
From this objective, the cluster focuses especially on four strategic areas: technological innovation, sustainable finance, talent and education, and new markets and international projection. In the technological field, the cluster wants to promote collaboration among the main actors in financial innovation, especially in fields such as artificial intelligence, digitalization, and cybersecurity. In addition, it also works to ensure that these innovations—often driven by fintechs—can grow within a regulatory framework that gives space to this innovation, and does not hinder it. All this, without losing sight of international projection, through business missions to learn about other financial ecosystems and foster new alliances.
From financial education to international companies
Despite the focus on companies in the financial sector, the cluster continues to look at society and its level of knowledge in this area. In fact, "financial education is a transversal issue where all actors agree",given the shortcomings they perceive in the training of both new generations and certain groups and companies in the field of finance.
In addition, the cluster looks beyond the limited scope of finance to foster connections between the sector and other economic areas, through events such as the one organized with the Efficient Energy Cluster of Catalonia. As Utrera highlights, these synergies are especially relevant at a time when Barcelona is strengthening its attractiveness for technology companies and global hubs.
International Landings
In this context, international companiesof the scopefintechas Revolut or Qonto have also chosen Barcelona as a base for expansion, a fact that positions and at the same time strengthens Barcelona as a hub for financial innovation. So much so that the BFC is working on a specific strategy to reinforce this segment and facilitate the arrival of new companies. Also in this context is framed the recent creation of the newinnovation center that the Bank of Spain has installed in its historic building in Plaza Catalunya. The center, which has emerged with the objective of testing new technologies in the field of finance and economics, reinforces the city as an emerging pole in this path of innovation.With this structure, the Barcelona Finance Cluster aspires to become a reference platform for the Catalan financial sector and an instrument to project Barcelona to the world. Thus, the BFC has a clear ambition: to position the city as an epicenter of investment, technology, and financial innovation, capable of competing with other European hubs and leading the development of the sector in Southern Europe.
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