BANKS love to talk up their tech credentials, but few go as far as BBVA, Spain’s second-biggest. In a surprise move last year, it promoted its head of digital banking, Carlos Torres, to second-in-command despite his lack of experience in retail banking. Digital transformation, the bank said, was its top strategic priority. To that end, it has spent around $200m over the past three years investing in fintech startups such as Atom, a British digital bank, and Simple, an American one. It has also invested in a data-crunching firm, a Bitcoin-trading outfit and a digital-design company, among others.

The shopping spree is not over yet. In mid-February BBVA injected an extra $150m into its $100m venture-capital arm and transferred it to a new subsidiary called Propel Venture Partners. This outfit, based in San Francisco and London, will operate independently of the rest of the bank, in an attempt to appeal to startups wary of working with a dinosaur.

BBVA is also trying to turn its existing operations into something resembling a tech firm. Some 600 employees at its headquarters near Madrid now work in small “scrums” incorporating people from IT, marketing, design and other divisions. They take on small projects with short deadlines, gathering daily in front of whiteboards dotted with fluorescent Post-It notes to chart their progress. The aim is to improve apps constantly, based on feedback from customers, including the direct telephone conversations with a personal account manager enabled by the app. BBVA calls it “the revolution of small things” and points to higher customer-satisfaction ratings as evidence of its success.

Investors are not quite as satisfied. BBVA’s emphasis on technology has not yet translated into any big benefit to the business, says Rohith Chandra, an analyst at Barclays, a British bank. Two years after the purchase of Simple, for example, it remains independently managed and in the red. Its most appealing features, such as clever budgeting software for customers, have not yet been adopted by other units.

Moreover, most big banks are investing heavily in technology and offering more services via fancy apps as custom at branches dwindles. BBVA’s digital offerings do not seem dramatically different from those of Santander or Caixabank, say, its biggest Spanish rivals. Caixabank recently launched ImaginBank, accessible only through mobile apps and social networks. Many big banks, including Barclays, Citigroup, HSBC, Santander and UBS, have invested in fintech startups. BBVA’s investments are so disparate that they seem driven chiefly by FOMO, as millennials might say, or fear of missing out.

Teppo Paavola, head of BBVA’s New Digital Business unit and a former executive at PayPal, makes no apologies for that. “Being paranoid is the way to go,” he says. BBVA can afford a digital flutter or two: it earned €2.6 billion ($2.9 billion) last year. Many of its 66m customers are in emerging markets, where few people have ingrained banking habits; that might allow more rapid technological change. Just under 30% of consumer loans at BBVA’s Mexican unit are issued digitally, up from 2% a year ago. If mobile banking can be made appealing enough that it allows BBVA to attract customers in such countries without building lots of expensive branches, then it could make a difference to the bottom line, Mr Chandra speculates.

For now, however, bricks and mortar are still an integral part of BBVA’s business model. It has no plans to close a big chunk of its 3,800 branches in Spain anytime soon. Transforming the bank is a gradual process which will take a very long time, the bank’s chairman recently said. That, at least, is not the sort of talk you would hear at a tech firm.