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The first few times I heard of forecast markets was through the blog of Jose Antonio Gallego, and he was the one who informed me of the launch of BBVA’s Actibva Predicciones which has the objective of complementing the economic information services and community that BBVA offers through its portal Actibva.

Actibva Predicciones is a tool for forecasting markets, developed by Strands, in which users try to predict the result of future events in the areas that interest them the most. The themes over which one can make predictions include economy, science, technology, business, politics, sports, health, art and entertainment and fashion and style.

Although I found the web a little bit confusing to use, I think that it penetrates a subject or concept that makes a lot of sense as it involves work around collective intelligence, a phenomenon with a great potential, and increasingly being put into play on the internet. I see the application of this concept most useful when applied to the economy and politics. They say that the masses always get it wrong but counting with the option of knowing people’s sentiment and expectations of what will happen in specific areas in the future could be of great help for companies and other institutions.

Jose del Moral writes about it: we now have a Zopa or Prosper for Spain, it’s called Comunitae and it has just received 2 million euros of investment from the fund Entrinnova.

The founders of Comunitae are Jose Miguel Rotaeche and Arturo Cervera, two ex directors of BBVA who since June of this year are working to bring to Spain the model of P2P bank or bank 2.0, whatever you would like to call it. The launch of this community of loans between individuals is scheduled for mid 2009.

Comunitae will do an analysis on each one of the loan requests and will classify them in function of their risk. The lenders will bid for the loan requests as for them participating in the community is an opportunity to invest. The managers of the community recommend the lenders to diversify their investments by categorizing loans on different levels.

The service of Comunitae also is considering helping non profit entities to obtain funding in favourable conditions, and for that they will be creating the option of groups.

Without doubt we are looking at a very ambitious project here, with an important investment. We will be keeping an eye on its development and the appearance of possible competitors. In Spain we already have the experience that within a short time of an idea succeeding in other countries, we see various similar projects coming into existence.

Today I had the privilege of attending, along with a select group of bloggers, the presentation of the web service BBVA Tu cuentas, in the presence of the the bank’s chariman and CEO.

I was very much surprised by the presentation and seeing the functioning of the product because the truth is that I didn’t expect to see something like this so soon here in Spain and much less from a bank. But the fact is that BBVA Tu cuentas is an very complete application for the management of personal finances and will be of great utility to its users.

There is a important differentiating factor between BBVA Tu cuentas and the rest of the applications of this kind that are available in the marketplace. In this case, the application connects to the website of the bank and that of other banks to obtain the financial information so the user doesn’t have to do it manually. Besides, the web connects with the utility companies (water, electricity, gas, …) saving us the labour of having to introduce the respective expenditures every month.

BBVA Tu cuentas complements with options of community in which a user can compare his/her financial situation with that of other groups of users representing different profiles. It also incorporates a service of recommendations of financial products, which uses the recommendation technology of Strands.

Strands is the company responsible for the development of the application and from what I observed, also responsible for defining much of the functional aspect of the site.

Now we are going to wait and see the reaction of the competition in face of this intiative. BBVA has taken the lead, we will have to see the response of Santander, Caja Madrid, La Caixa, … and also how it affects independent applications like MoneyTrackin.

More information in the blog of Strands.