Bankinter Consumer Finance and the Comillas Pontifical University hold the eighth edition of the Business Ethics Research Awards

The Economic and Business Ethics Chair at the Comillas Pontifical University (Comillas ICADE) and Bankinter Consumer Finance, a consumer subsidiary of Bankinter Group, today held the eighth edition of the Business Ethics Research Awards. The awards ceremony took place at the Bankinter Palace (Paseo de la Castellana, Madrid) and brought together award-winning researchers, jury members, executives and institutional representatives.

The first prize was awarded to Esperanza Hernández Cuadra for her doctoral thesis entitled “Ethics and Compliance Programmes in a Changing Business Paradigm”, supervised by Prof. José Luis Fernández Fernández from the Comillas Pontifical University. The jury remarked on the depth of her research and its practical relevance in the analysis of the internal legitimacy of Ethics and Compliance programmes, especially in a business context that is increasingly demanding regarding ethics, sustainability and the creation of value for stakeholders.

The second prize went to Gustavo A. Yepes-López, José Luis Camarena-Martínez, Julián Mauricio Cruz-Pulido and Luz Jeannette Quintero-Campos for their joint study on limits to corporate bribery in Latin America, based on the implementation of an empirical model in nearly 3,000 corporates across seven countries in the region.

Sofía Unda Benkhadra took the third prize for her research on the professional certification of ethical leadership promoted by the ELO Institute, a pioneering initiative on an international scale as it offers a credible and well-founded value proposition for certifying ethical leadership.

Teresa Moreno Madrid won the fourth prize for her paper “Corporates and human rights: Current legislative initiatives”. The work offers a rigorous and up-to-date analysis of international human rights and business regulations, combining legal soundness and an applied ethical perspective.

The remaining finalist projects address topics as diverse as human rights legislation, organisational resilience, the use of AI in home care services—a line of research aligned with multiple initiatives seeking to leverage technological development, digitalisation and artificial intelligence to solve increasingly evident problems that demand efficient attention—prosocial behaviour through meditation, and gender diversity on boards of directors.

The papers presented to this eighth edition of the awards all demonstrated the highest academic level and an international focus, confirming the growing recognition for the event and the sustained interest in addressing business ethics from a rigorous and global perspective.

The Bankinter Consumer Finance Awards for Research in Business Ethics have established themselves as a benchmark in the academic field, rewarding rigorous reflection and critical thinking applied to ethical challenges in the corporate environment. The initiative was launched in 2017 as a result of an agreement reached between the Economic and Business Ethics Chair at Comillas ICADE and Bankinter Consumer Finance to promote a more ethical, sustainable and committed business culture.

A multidisciplinary jury with an international vision

The jury for this edition was chaired by Alfonso María Saez Alonso-Muñumer, a managing director of Bankinter and head of Bankinter Consumer Finance, and was made up professionals from the academic, business and ethical fields: Paloma Rodríguez Arango, head of Corporate Reputation and CSR at Bankinter; Almudena Rodríguez Beloso, head of Institutional and Corporate Relations at Valora; Inés Gomis Bertrand, managing partner at Temple Asesores; Juan Benavides Delgado, a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid; Fernando Velasco Fernández, senior lecturer and head of the chair at the Rey Juan Carlos University; Javier Fuertes López, lecturer at Comillas and director of the Unijes Ethics Group; Diana Loyola Chávez, lecturer at Comillas ICADE; and Marta González Álvarez , lecturer at the University of Burgos and a member of the Economic and Business Ethics Chair at Comillas ICADE.

José Luis Fernández Fernández, head of the Economic and Business Ethics Chair at Comillas ICADE, moderated the deliberations and acted as secretary of the jury.

At the ceremony, Alfonso Saez Alonso-Muñumer, chairman of the jury, said: “Our commitment to ethics and good corporate governance is not a temporary development but forms part of our identity as an organisation. These awards reinforce a crucial alliance between universities and businesses to promote critical thinking, ethical innovation and purposeful leadership. For us, recognising research talent that addresses the major moral challenges of the business environment is a way of building the future.”

José Luis Fernández, head of the chair, added: “Rewarding research recognises that, along with the transmission of knowledge through teaching and the transfer of knowledge to society, the mission of universities is also to create knowledge. This demands rigorous and systematic intellectual efforts aimed at discovering either new realities and forming a more complete understanding of existing realities that are insufficiently known and merit greater study. There are two reasons for this. The first is of a theoretical nature and consists in get one step closer to the truth of things; the second one, with a more pragmatic approach, is about humanising the lives of individuals and the societies we inhabit, nurturing creation and respecting the environment that is our home.”

 The initiative is a way for Bankinter Consumer Finance and the Comillas Pontifical University to reinforce their commitment to more ethical, critical and socially engaged business management.

About Bankinter Consumer Finance

Bankinter Group's fully-owned consumer finance subsidiary has become one of the fastest-growing financial institutions in the Spanish banking sector in recent years thanks to its alignment with Bankinter's prudent credit risk policy. Active in Spain, Portugal and Ireland, the company closed the first quarter of 2025 with 2.3 million customers, up 5% on the previous year. Its loans and receivables amounted to 7.9 billion euros, reflecting year-on-year growth of 12%.

 About the Comillas ICADE Economic and Business Ethics Chair

The Economic and Business Ethics Chair at the Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences of the Comillas Pontifical University (Comillas ICADE) is a forum for analysing, discussing and researching topics related to business ethics, social responsibility and corporate citizenship. It provides a meeting point for academics, entrepreneurs, managers and other professionals keen to promote ethical leadership in organisations in the context of a global economy.