In today’s economic landscape of digital transformation, best-case customer experience is critical to business success and customer-centricity is the key factor for competitive advantage. Realizing that, Akbank AG decided to invest in digitizing their operational processes, including document management.
Murat Sari, COO of Akbank AG says: ‘We wanted to transform the bank from scratch, by using a cloud-native environment.’
Founded in 1948 and listed on the Istanbul stock exchange, T.A.Ş. is one of the largest banks in Turkey. German subsidiary Akbank AG is headquartered in Eschborn, Germany. Its core business areas include corporate banking, trade finance, wealth management and retail banking.
Improved customer experience
The way you make a bank cloud-native, Sari explains, is to adopt a cloud-native core banking system that takes care of fundamental banking modules. Then all other applications a bank needs, like document management, can be linked to the core banking system: ‘It is a simple, but hi-tech solution, leading to increased efficiency. It means a shorter time to market, a quicker response time and an improved customer experience.’
Akbank AG had been using Hyarchis’s Document Management System for almost ten years, so after learning of Hyarchis’s own cloud-native solutions, Hyarchis was a natural fit to take Akbank AG’s systems from on-premise to the cloud.
Sari says: ‘Customers have more ways to interact with digital platforms, and that means we need to do more to know our customers, to ensure that we implement necessary controls. Even with a digital archive containing a variety of data, it can be hard to form a holistic image of a customer. Therefore, it was important for us to find a solution to automatically store data in the right location using an existing tool.
From days to hours
‘When you capture the data correctly,’ Sari says, ‘it improves data accuracy and with better data analysis, we can provide better products to our customers.’ A case in point is Akbank AG’s newly created credit loan origination and approval process, a process that until recently had been done mainly manually. ‘We can now fully automate and link new loan applications to the digital documentation we have of them. This reduces the time of the application process from days to hours.’
‘Customer-centricity is indeed the key factor. By going paperless and digitalizing our operations, we have more efficient processes.’
