DenizBank's modern, nimble IT system has a series of admirers in the banking world, and includes none other than Bill Gates among those who it has impressed. The bank's chief operating officer tells The Banker how DenizBank is now ready to take its IT knowhow to a wider international audience.
Turkish banks are not known to be shy of taking risks and bringing in new technology to advance their service quality, often at a rate faster than their peers in more developed economies. It is little wonder, then, that Dilek Duman, chief operating officer at DenizBank, Turkey’s eighth largest bank by assets, approached a complete systems upgrade with relish.
She says that while replacing an old system with a new one carries risks, the alternative – being unwilling or unable to upgrade a system in a way that has happened at many western European and US banks – simply means leaving "patchwork" systems that cannot support future products.
This is not the case at DenizBank. “We place great emphasis on mobility and being able to access banking services from anywhere and in any way,” says Ms Duman.
Impressive history
Ms Duman’s legacy at DenizBank goes back to the bank’s early days in 1997, when she set up its IT department. She was previously at Intertech, the core banking solution centre of Interbank, one of the banks that the Savings and Deposits Insurance Fund of the Turkey's central bank eventually took over when the banking crisis hit the country in 2001.
It is with this opportunistic mindset that she has forged a career in banking IT and revamped an old core banking solution into a cost-effective and open platform with various modules that work just as well individually. After the revamp, she returned to DenizBank, where she considers her prime role to be a focus on service quality.
DenizBank, at this point, was a customer of Intertech, as were a number of other banks. This changed in 2002, when DenizBank acquired Intertech, although it would be another two years before the two banks' IT systems would merge. “Our discussions focused on creating an integrated web-based platform [that would meet] all the needs of a bank,” she says.
DenizBank was keen to use the latest Microsoft software, but the latest software was still in development and not going to be available in time to meet the production target date Ms Duman and her team had set for the new platform. “So we asked Bill Gates for permission to use the new products in our solutions. He [liked] our project and let us use the beta tools,” she says. More than that, the Microsoft founder became a project sponsor. The project began in June 2005 and by July 2007, the bank switched off its old core banking system and moved to the new platform.
A complete solution
Today, Intertech’s suite of products is called Inter-Next. There are currently 12 other banks, plus DenizBank, that outsource all or part of their IT technology to Intertech – which helps with identifying market trends and demands, says Ms Duman. Having an open, multi-channel platform enables the delivery of new products faster, she says.
Ms Duman describes Inter-Next as a complete banking solution with a customer relationship management (CRM) component, alternative delivery channels, a business process management tool, and a business intelligence layer – tools that can be, and are, used at other organisations, not just banks. Of course, there is also a core banking solution. Other tools include software as a service, data centre hosting, mobile payments and even a Facebook branch, with which banks can open a virtual branch on the social networking site and offer “all kind of transactions and services”, including sending money to friends.
For 2013, the bank plans to focus even more on mobility, completing the development of a solution that can offer location-based advertising and marketing through online CRM. The online CRM project will analyse customer data and offer a suitable product to them when they are near a matching merchant.
Ease of doing business
Ms Duman is keen to emphasise that no major changes have taken place at DenizBank since it was acquired by Sberbank in October last year. “Sberbank focuses on how it can benefit from our know-how and how it can use this know-how for its other subsidiaries,” she says.
“We have reached a certain level of saturation in Turkey. From now on, we will work more with banks abroad. Sberbank likes our technology and it has chosen Inter-Next as the new platform for [its subsidiary] Volksbanken International. We are implementing a whole new solution and starting with Austria, where the bank focuses on branchless banking.” The Volksbanken project in Austria commenced earlier this year and will last six months, after which other countries will follow.
Inter-Next is already in use in Austria at DenizBank’s subsidiary, DenizBank AG, and complies with Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) requirements as well as German and Austrian regulations. “SEPA does not apply to Turkish banks, but as our Austrian subsidiary had to, we built it into the system anyway,” says Ms Duman. “Now we are involved in a new project to implement part of the Inter-Next package in Russia at Nomos Bank.” This project began in November 2012 and is scheduled to be completed in May.
“Turkey is in a position to export know-how on banking IT solutions," says Ms Duman. "But [the banks] have to put in the time and effort to market this potential. For instance, in November last year I discussed this potential with Sberbank, about how we could transfer it. Sberbank, like other banks, has legacy systems in place. We discussed how it could achieve its goals with a new IT structure – these kinds of discussions go beyond just simply implementing a new system. We will now transfer our know-how to Sberbank, as well as [elsewhere in] Europe and even the US.”
