Evaluation of 2018: Strategies, Developments and Future Goals

Ziraat Participation will continue to step up its financing for the real sector and contributions to economic growth in the future, in line with Turkey’s 2023 targets.

Ziraat Participation maintained its strong financial and operational performance in 2018, generating a profit of TL 323 million, an increase of 103% over the previous year.

In order to meet the financial needs of its customers through the right channels at the right time and with the right value proposition, Ziraat Participation has continued to be the reliable solution partner of its customers in corporate and retail banking business lines by ensuring product, service and distribution channel diversity in line with participation banking principles and by increasing service quality.

With the new products and services that will contribute to the development of participation banking, Ziraat Participation provides the most appropriate source of financing for its stakeholders and enhances its service quality day by day.

Ziraat Participation will continue to increase the support it provides in financing to the real sector and its contributions to economic growth in the future, in line with Turkey’s 2023 targets.

Corporate and Entrepreneurial Banking

Contributing to the economic development of our country in accordance with the principles of participation banking, Ziraat Participation continues to create healthy and sustainable value in this area with the products it offers which meet the needs of its customers and by increasing service quality.

The SME Support Loan

Ziraat Participation rounded off a productive year achieving new customer acquisitions with the aim of increasing the share of the sector by working to meet the differentiated needs of its SME customers.

The SME Support Loan Project, which provides financing opportunities for SMEs with preferential conditions when compared to the market, has been implemented with the cooperation of Ziraat Participation and TOBB. Within the framework of this project, a monthly profit rate of 1.85% and total maturity of 18 months with a six month grace period was provided to SMEs. The SME Support Loan product, which was introduced to SMEs on 20 September 2018, currently continues to be offered to customers. By the end of 2018, more than 100 SMEs had been provided with TL 15 million of funds through this loan.

Retail Banking

Offering innovative products and services that create value for its customers in retail banking, Ziraat Participation continued to expand its active customer base in 2018 with its customer-oriented approach.

Adding 17 new branches to its service network in 2018, Ziraat Participation today offers the most appropriate solutions to meet the needs of its customers through its 80 branches, 66 ATMs, Internet and Mobile Banking applications and the Call Center.

The main activities of Ziraat Participation carried out in the field of retail banking in 2018 were as follows:

The housing sector undertakes the task of being a driver of the economy, in terms of the employment and the sub-sectors it affects.
In order to provide support to the housing sector, which plays such an important role in our country’s economy, as well as meeting the needs and expectations of its customers in the most appropriate manner in line with the principles of participation banking, Ziraat reduced its housing financing rates from May 2018, and in the context of the campaign which continued until the end of June, more than 1,500 customers became homeowners.
Ziraat Participation was the first participation bank to be included as an intermediary in the issuance of the Gold-based Lease Certificate to be issued by the Republic of Turkey Ministry of Treasury and Finance, in an effort to bring gold from under-the-mattress into the economic system.
In accordance with the protocol signed between Ziraat Participation and the General Directorate of Public Accounts of the Ministry of Treasury and Finance, payments made by the taxpayers on behalf of the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization within the scope of the Zoning Law No. 3194 and the collection of payments to be made to the title deed within the scope of the same law could be carried out through the E-collection system by the Bank from 5 November 2018.
Within the context of the correspondent banking project, anyone could become a Ziraat Participation customer simply by opening a Ziraat Participation account through any Ziraat Bank branch, and apply for a Ziraat Participation Debit Card.

In 2018, Ziraat Participation expanded its branch network and alternative service channels while advancing its fast and multi-channel access to products and services approach further, and has achieved significant progress in the development of digital service channels.

Digital Banking

Aiming to provide high level of satisfaction to its customers, Ziraat Participation has expanded its branch network and alternative service channels in 2018 and adopted a fast, multi-channel access based approach to products and services, and has achieved significant progress towards its target of development of digital service channels.

In 2018, the following steps were realized in this field:

ATMs

As of the end of 2018, the number of active Ziraat Participation Bank ATMs increased by 20% compared to the previous year, to reach 66.
A card copying security application is used in all ATMs in order to protect customers from ATM fraud.
Non-bank customers are provided with English, German, Arabic and Russian language options.
An audio menu for visually impaired customers was put in pace in all ATMs, and the Orthopedic Disabled ATM at the Bursa Branch and the IZU Halkalı ATMs were installed and brought into use.
Depositing money into accounts, credit card debt payments, credit card debt and limit inquiry functions were added to the ATM joint transaction menu.
With the protocols signed with Ziraat Bank, Halkbank, VakıfBank and Vakıf Participation Bank, the “Free joint ATM usage” project has been implemented and the transactions of withdrawals, deposits to the account and balance inquiries could be carried out from around 15,000 ATMs throughout Turkey in order to ensure that customers enjoy easy access to banking services.

A total of 2,349,348 transactions were realized in 2018 at the 66 ATM units, with TL 820 million in transaction volumes, an increase of 58% compared to the previous year.

Customer Contact Center and Solution Support Center

In 2018, a total of 413,363 calls were made to the Customer Response Center’s voice response system, and 207,669 calls were received by customer representatives
The service level of the Customer Contact Center was 88.46% (target; 80%) and the call coverage ratio was 97.36% (target; 98%).
A total of 60,710 outbound calls were made from the Customer Contact Center.
A total of 208,894 informative SMS texts and 469,828 informative e-mails were sent from the Customer Contact Center.
The Solution Support Center received 31,009 customer calls.
42,773 outbound calls were made from the Solution Support Center.
In order to obtain the contracts of customers applying from the website without them having to go to the branch, the decision was taken to work with the Telekurye company, and a contract was signed.
The Live Response app was integrated with the Participation Mobile app to allow all customers to communicate with their customer representatives.
In order to increase the performance of the Customer Communication Center, improve operational processes and evaluate the customer experience, Interview Analysis project studies started to analyze interviews conducted with customers.
As of September 2018, the Bank’s call center operation started to be executed by Ziraat Bank, providing services at Ziraat Bank’s Samsun site.

The number of Ziraat Participation Internet Banking members surged by 105% in 2018 to reach 242,000.

Internet Banking

Ziraat Participation’s Internet Banking transaction functions were expanded so customers could perform all of their banking transactions through the branchless channel.
In 2018, the number of Internet Banking and Participation Mobile customers, and the number of transactions, more than doubled.
At the end of the last quarter of 2018, efforts were taken to align the Internet branch with mobile devices in order to enhance customer experience.
The corporate website will be renewed in 2019 with an innovative and user-friendly design.

In 2018, the number of Ziraat Participation Internet Banking members reached 242,000, marking an increase of 105%. The number of transactions conducted over the Internet Banking channel reached 624,000, increasing by 23% compared to 2017.

Mobile Banking

Customers were offered the option of direct payment (via account) via Participation Mobile on e-commerce sites.
The Participation Mobile application reached 300,000 downloads by the end of 2018.
A Live Response function was added to the Participation Mobile application, providing instant written communication between customers and customer representatives.
In 2019, in line with the demands and expectations of corporate customers, the transaction functions of the Participation Mobile corporate application will be expanded.
In the context of digital marketing activities, the Company begun to update customers about campaigns, innovations and news through the mobile application.
As an alternative to logging in over the Participation Mobile application with a code sent through SMS, efforts are being made to enable customers to login with a single password. The single password login feature will be available to customers in the first months of 2019.

Customer Satisfaction

Ziraat Participation, which adopts a customer-centric service approach and continuously strives to increase customer satisfaction, conducts workshops with the units to produce permanent solutions to deal with common complaints from customers. In addition, the Satisfied Customer Line was put into service.

By the end of November 2018, a total of 4,916 notifications were resolved by the Customer Satisfaction Unit. The average resolution period for complaint notifications was 1.74 days and the average resolution period for the complaints was 3.23 days.

The ISO 10002: 2014 Customer Satisfaction Management Quality Certificate, which was received in the first year of the Bank’s establishment and indicates that customer notifications were answered to a high standard of quality and were undergoing continuous development according to international standards, was renewed in 2018.

In accordance with the customer-oriented business discipline, Ziraat Participation winds up the complaint responses within the SLA period. The average response rate of banks in the sector is between 5-7 business days; Ziraat Participation is one of the fastest banks in this field.

Treasury Management and International Banking

Ziraat Participation expanded its asset size by more than 50% in 2018, in line with the real sector and foreign trade financing strategy, while pursuing a strategy to finance the real sector and foreign trade.

Ziraat Participation pressed ahead with its resource diversification in asset liability management with the main resource being participation funds, and it established a liability base of the balance sheet taking into consideration optimum cost and term. The Bank adopted a strategy of effectively managing the pools of participation funds. In this context, Ziraat Participation expanded its resource opportunities from local and international banks in TL and foreign currency in 2018.

Ziraat Participation has effectively deployed interbank borrowing and financing products to fulfill the required reserve liability and to meet its liquidity needs in line with the principles of participation banking, and to assess the surplus and fulfillment of reserve requirements.

Correspondent Relations

In 2018 Ziraat Participation established a swift correspondent relationship with a significant number of banks by completing the legislative compliance processes and quickly met the requests in the foreign trade field.

In 2018, Ziraat Participation signed an additional Euro correspondent account with correspondent banks and reached 39 different correspondent accounts in 10 different currencies and signed mutual wakala / murabaha contracts with a number of banks. Within the framework of these contracts, foreign resources were provided with the aim of widening the diversity of the resources with interbank Murabaha and Wakala transactions.

Ziraat Participation, which plays an active role in the capital markets as a part of its strategy to enrich the resource structure, obtained issuance approval with ceilings of TL 500 million, TL 2 billion and TL 4 billion from the Capital Markets Board to issue three separate TL denominated lease certificates in the local market with its affiliates, Ziraat Katılım Varlık Kiralama and ZKB Varlık Kiralama. Within this framework, issuances were made in different amounts with a total of TL 3.5 billion.

In 2018, Ziraat Participation continued to provide long term resources from the World Bank and various other development banks, for financing SMEs and foreign trade financing and to maintain its financing support for SMEs and the real sector.

Ziraat Participation aims to complete the following steps in 2019:

Significantly increase the number of correspondent banks and the level of foreign trade volume,
Use a murabaha syndicated loan with the participation of international banks,
Continue issuing lease certificates in the domestic markets,
Add depth to the capital markets by carrying out corporate lease certificate issuances in favor of third parties other than Ziraat Participation, through the newly established asset leasing company,
Provide increasing support to the real sector by maintaining a supply of resources from international institutions for the financing of SMEs and foreign trade,
Mediate new transactions within the scope of country loans.

Operational Transactions

In 2018, Ziraat Participation implemented an array of operational measures in order to contribute to operational efficiency and to facilitate and accelerate the process of the participation banking product and service offering.

The manual follow-up process of the foreclosure documents communicated to the Bank through the Registered Electronic Mail was abandoned, and the documents received as a result of the integration were automatically transferred to the main banking system. The automation of this process, which had consumed around 20% of work time, achieved a combination of time savings and minimized operational risk resulting from carelessness.
Through the identity sharing system, collective inquiries have been carried out periodically for existing customers, ensuring that up-to-date information was transferred to the bank system by determining the persons whose information had changed for reasons such as divorce, name change and address change (ADNKS address).
Within the scope of the Privacy Act, required screen improvements were completed and the process of selecting the customer preferences regarding the Privacy Act during the account opening process and recording it on the customer slip was completed.
In the EBA correspondence application, the Official Correspondence module was put into practice. Incoming articles were sent to the addressees through the Official Correspondence module instead of by mail.
In order to prioritize the disabled customers in Sıramatik, the development was completed and brought to the real environment.

Ziraat Participation, which aims to improve its customer experience in the field of information technologies and thus increase productivity, quality and speed, has achieved significant progress by integrating the innovation and change management required in the current era with its systems and processes.

Information Technologies

Ziraat Participation, which aims to improve customer experience in the field of information technologies and thus increase productivity, quality and speed, has achieved significant progress by integrating the innovation and change management demanded by the current era with its systems and processes.

Ziraat Participation maintained its efforts to raise awareness within the scope of information security activities and achieved significant gains in 2018.

In order to prevent IT infrastructure from being put at risk by external systems, work has been completed for the secure site audit application.
Endpoint threat, detection and intervention system (EDR) dissemination work has been completed.
Work on the necessary controls within the scope of Swift CSP (customer safety program), and the corporate systems of regulations have been completed.

Ziraat Participation has made significant progress with the technology and modernization of infrastructure.

The project of bringing the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) into service for employees of third party solution providers and the Call Center has been completed.
The project to switch from existing foreign-based products to the open source Zabbix application as the 24/7 system monitoring infrastructure was completed.
Applications for external secure file exchange (ZKDrive) for Virtual Systems monitoring and reporting (vROPS), virtual systems centralized log collection and analysis (Log Insight) and for virtual systems network analysis and monitoring (VRNI) were completed and implemented.
The project to provide console access for remote support to the Data Center Network and Security Devices was completed.
The branch network structure was made more efficient by using the LTE (mobile data) system
The physical backup of the data center fiber-optic lines was completed.
The missed call management system was brought into operation.
Work on the infrastructure service to allow analysis of network traffic has been completed
The Emergency Center Business Unit tests, which should be carried out at least once a year, have been completed.
The security infrastructure project for ATM devices has been completed.

Ziraat Participation has also achieved significant progress within the scope of implementation development activities.

Efforts were initiated to develop the main banking software with internal resources, and many projects have been developed with internal resources, thus contributing significantly to speed and efficiency.
An important step has been taken in the transformation process of the main banking application to the independent operating system, with the work aimed to be completed in 2019.
Omni Channel Infrastructure, Mobile Application and Internet Branch started to be operated and developed with internal resources.
The Participation Mobile Direct Payment Infrastructure (Company) project was completed.
Soft OTP transformation studies, which are being held up as a way of eliminating the need for an SMS to be sent as the secondary verification method, were completed and pilot studies got underway
The Performance Management project for the branches was completed.
Customer and Product Activity Project work was completed.