For most banking customers, the idea of replacing cash with a mobile phone, checking their credit card’s balance via an inbuilt screen or speaking to a teller via an ATM’s video link is sheer science fiction. In Turkey, however, this particular vision of the future is already a reality.
It might be surprising to discover that much of the technology being deployed by the Eurasian republic’s financial institutions is of a level of sophistication that their Western peers can only dream of. After all, Turkey is usually classed as an emerging, or at best, newly industrialised economy. And for years, its entire financial system seemed to be in a perpetual state of crisis, while its banks offered only the most basic of services.
