[Mahn]

Perhaps these acquisitions are not so much a bet on "neo-banks", but rather serve as an insurance to make sure they never grow large and pose a threat?

[ganeumann]

BBVA barely had a footprint in the US before the Simple acquisition so it wasn't insurance, it was one of the cheapest ways to enter the US market.

[stevedomin]

BBVA Compass(1) was 30th in the ranking of the 50 largest banks in the U.S. (SNL financial data from 2013), definitely not the biggest one but it's harsh to say that it barely had any footprint.

(1) BBVA bought Compass in 2007

[ganeumann]

Sure, but bank size falls off very quickly after the biggest four. Compass is about 3% of the size of JPMorgan by assets (source: http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/03/03/ranking-the-50-big...), and 10% of the size of JPMorgan by branches (http://www.usbanklocations.com/bank-rank/number-of-branches....). Theirs are less than 0.7% of bank branches in the US, compared to JPMorgan's 6.6% of branches.

You can disagree with whether this means they had barely any footprint or not, I guess that's semantics, but it certainly makes more sense that they would buy them to expand, not to get rid of a competitor.