This article was originally published in the Summer 2019 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issue delivered directly to your inbox. 

Successful banks have always been the ones that forge value-added personal relationships with their customers, which is why it’s crucial to ensure that they deliver the perfect initial customer onboarding process. Customers tend to drop out at the onboarding stage if there’s a long-drawn-out process where they are required to answer the same questions multiple times and produce several documents. Consequently, banks need to optimise their procedures to deliver a quick, effective and intuitive experience.

One way to do this is to develop a banking mode based on innovation and digital transformation. That’s exactly what global finance corporation ING Turkey aimed to do when it entered the Turkish market in 2007. However, because ING Turkey entered the market via a merger and acquisition, it had to contend with challenges caused by decades-old legacy systems. The main issue was that the poor user experience offered by the existing IT infrastructure made it impossible for bank staff to deliver truly compelling user interactions. 

“The user experience with our legacy systems was a significant issue,” says Bahar Savaş, senior vice president of Application Development Core Banking at ING Turkey. “As a bank focused on digital transformation and innovation, we rely on creative people. Thus, we needed to attract new talent and we had to offer people new and intuitive software. Meanwhile, we spent a considerable amount of time on training people and improve ourselves in terms of employee turnover.” 

ING Turkey established a core set of goals to help it achieve its digital banking vision. First, it wanted to improve the user experience for its employees and make operations and processes more intuitive. 

“We wanted a solution that was so simple that an employee could start using it without training,” explains Savaş, adding that the bank also wanted the application to facilitate information sharing between its headquarters and branches. 

The bank’s second goal was to implement an IT environment that would deliver a high level of performance and security. The old legacy application was built using the client-server approach, so the bank wanted the new service-based architecture to drive increased agility and flexibility to support digital transformation initiatives within the bank. 

However, the main goal was to deliver a fully digital customer experience that resulted in improved customer engagement and made it quicker to onboard new clients. 

ING Turkey implemented VeriBranch, an integrated branch automation solution from VeriPark, to optimise branch operations and enhance the onboarding experience for both customers and employees. All banking applications have been integrated and consolidated on one end-to-end platform to provide employees with easy access to customer information and empower them to deliver an improved customer service. 

In the past, for example, agents had to use up to 10 screens to complete a transaction, but now they can do everything on a single screen. Not only has this made it easier for bank staff to carry out multiple transactions, but it has also cut customer wait times by 50%. Similarly, the 25-minute onboarding process that involved retail customers and small- and medium-sized enterprises signing multiple documents has been reduced to just six minutes because it now only requires one customer signature. 

VeriBranch also provides a 360-degree view of each customer’s behaviour, preferences and interaction history with the bank. ING Turkey has combined the platform with its campaign management system to provide each individual customer with personalised services and relevant offers.

ING Turkey’s new solution has also halved the time it takes to train employees. Plus, the bank’s 150 developers can use the standardised framework and advanced security and compliance features in VeriBranch to quickly develop, integrate and roll out new products. 

“We want to have the best people and we are no longer losing talent because of legacy technologies,” comments Savaş. “We have managed to significantly reduce the length of standard training for new employees from two days to just one, improving our productivity and cutting costs. Because the application is so intuitive, we could migrate many of our training courses online.”

Implementing VeriPark’s solution has delivered a broad range of benefits and provides the foundation ING Turkey needs to accelerate its digital transformation journey and achieve continued market success. In future, ING Turkey plans to expand the platform to support additional processes and roll out gamification features that will reward branch employees for achieving set goals and successful sales. 

“We were looking for a resilient and powerful platform that would deliver the security, compliance and user experience components and features we needed,” says Savaş. “This was exactly what VeriPark delivered.” 

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