[1][2][7] He planned to become an industrial engineer, but abandoned his studies when he was just three classes short of a degree after being appointed as the Director of the Banco de Bilbao in 1903, at 25 years of age, thus being the youngest member of the board.
[1][5] He entered the board of the Banco de Bilbao on 31 December 1903 and remained there throughout his entire professional career and for the rest of his life until he died,[1][7][5] except for a brief period in which the Basque Government of José Antonio Aguirre relieved the directors of their positions.
[2][7] He also had a prominent role in the process of nationalization of the securities of the large Spanish railway companies,[1][2][3][7] which in Bilbao acquired particular importance due to the interest among local businessmen in improving the port's communication routes with the interior of the Iberian Peninsula.
[1][2][7] In January 1941, during a critical period in which Banco de Bilbao needed to adapt to the complicated circumstances in which Spain found itself after the Spanish Civil War and also to strict government measures, the then CEO José Manuel Figueras resigned and Víctor Artola was appointed as his successor,[5] and in the following year, on 31 January 1942, in the first Annual General Meeting since 1936, the General shareholders approved the reform of the entity's statutes, with the most important change being to set aside the tradition of rotating the chairmanship of the board of directors on an annual basis and then unanimously appointed the 64-year-old Arteche as its first permanent president, abandoning the rotating nature that this position had until then.
[1][2][7][5] The professional partnership of Artola as CEO and Arteche as chairman was decisive in allowing Banco de Bilbao to successfully navigate the difficult years of the 1940s, and together, they turned the bank into an entity with a national presence without sacrificing international ambitions.
[5] From the moment he became chairman, Arteche's activity was marked by the modernization that he introduced in the Banco de Bilbao and by the effective participation that he and the entity he presided had in a good number of companies in very diverse productive sectors.
[1][7] Regarding the first aspect, Arteche piloted the modernization of the Bank of Bilbao, creating its central administration in the 1940s and opening its foreign service in 1945, while developing a territorial network of offices throughout Spain.
[1] Arteche was also a member of the Board of the Bank of Spain as a representative of the Superior Banking Council, and held the vice presidency of two large companies located in two strategic sectors: communications and automotive: the National Telephone Company of Spain (Telefónica) and the Spanish Society of Touring Cars (Spanish: Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo, SEAT).
[1] In the 1923 Spanish general elections for deputies to the Cortes on 30 April 1923, Arteche presented himself as a candidate for the Monarchist League in the district of Markina in Biscay, which he won,[1][3][7][10] but his political work was cut short on the following 12 September following the coup d'état by Primo de Rivera.