Yapi Kredi, Istanbul, Turkey: Yapi Kredi Mobile

Yapi Kredi Mobile Banking app was first released in 2011.

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We continue to make life easier for our customers with Yapı Kredi Mobile's new design and user-friendly interface in 2020. With Yapı Kredi Mobile, which we developed by focusing on customer experience, our customers can perform more than 800 banking transactions from loan application to bill payment. Users who want to become a Yapı Kredi Customer, can easily become a customer of Yapı Kredi Mobile without going to the branch, and immediately start benefiting from the services offered by Yapı Kredi Mobile. We offer end-to-end digital onboarding experience, making their journey in the bank easier.  By creating MyCar+, we wanted to make a service for all the things about cars at single point as a first step of our super-app strategy. With features such as Mobile Approval and Smart Notification, we have enabled our customers to approve transactions made in other channels via Yapı Kredi Mobile. Yapı Kredi Mobile has scores 4.7/5 on the App Store and 4.8/5 on Google Play. As the end of 2021, the number of digitally onboarded customers has doubled and number of digital active customers increased by 20% and reached to 9 million. Market share in Digital Financial Transactions increased by 33 points.

As the bank that broke grounds with many innovations in the sector; Yapı Kredi has always been the pioneer of digital banking in Turkey. In the last years, we have restructured traditional banking experience with our ground-breaking innovations. Our success is actually lying under our clear digital strategy which relies on delivering continuous innovations to redefine customer experience, focusing on mobile and also successfully leveraging APIs wherever customer needs. At Yapı Kredi, we always aim to sustain our leader position by rapidly introducing new technologies to our customers. Along the journey of building digital bank of Turkey, we focus on 5 main areas: Customer Experience, Convergence: «Mobile as a Remote Control», End-to-End Digital, Expanding Ecosystem, and Digital Payments. In this way, we are creating seamless, simple, unified and personal experiences across all customer touchpoints and an ecosystem that accompanies customers through life journey.
Customer Experience
We initially focused on providing superior “customer experience” at all our touchpoints. In line with this, we developed our channels ensuring same look and feel shaping experience by innovations. Beyond UX/UI of the channels, we unified processes as well. Especially in pandemic, it was very vital to not to be outside, especially for people who are above a certain age. Thus, for our pensioner customers, we made easy to pension transactions. Our customers can give promotion commitment whether or not they already have one, they can change their branch or if they don’t receive their pension from our bank, they can transfer it to our bank. In 2020, we renewed out app interface by using Flat 2.0 design principles, which involves adding depth in design elements with minimal shadow usage. The other principles of Flat 2.0 are; white background, big & bold fonts and; limited & minimal usage of color transitions. These principles enabled the decrease of UX / UI based problems. They also enabled us to work on the dark mode version of the app, with the help of the contrast created with white background and bigger fonts. In line with our customer-driven strategy, we added another innovative feature, IBAN Scanner, into Yapi Kredi Mobile. The motivation behind our newest innovation was the challenge of typing 26 digits of IBAN (International Bank Account Number) while transferring money. With our unique feature, we enable our customers to log any written IBAN in miliseconds and facilitates money transfer. In addition, our focus to make the investment transactions easier to make our customers more comfortable about investing. We created an easy-to-understand platform with to let our customers to do investments easily by themselves, whether they are novice or expert in investing. With this goal, we designed our app with easy-to-use menu and transactions. Retrospective follow-up, changing private pension fund distribution and other investments are very easy to do for our customers without any other help.
Convergence: «Mobile as a Remote Control» 
In line with our mobile convergence strategy, we positioned “mobile” as the remote control of the bank to ultimately enhance customer experience. We are endeavoring to make all touchpoints intercommunicate with each other under the same roof. For example, with our new function e-order, our corporate customers can give their orders with Yapı Kredi Mobile, without visiting the branch. They can upload their orders by PDF or JPEG file, taking a photo of the order text or simply writing into the order entry box. Especially during Covid-19 pandemic, our mobile convergence strategy has become even more critical than before. Before, our customers have preferred contactless transactions because of their convenience. But nowadays, contactless methods are more than convenient, they are vital. We care about our customers’ priorities. Considering these, we have always been working to digitalize all the processes we can, while there are transactions that cannot be completely digitalized because of the government regulations. We have been able to clearly observe how our existing “Mobile as a Remote Control” strategy gained importance during Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, %78 of our customers used digital banking for their transactions. Also in 2020, our customer acquisition via video onboarding increased by 211%, compared to the year before.
Digital Payments
As the sector leader in Turkey regarding number of credit cards, issuing & acquiring endorsement, digital payment solutions are one of our main focus areas. Therefore, we designed “World Pay” which aims to create a seamless payment experience without physical / plastic card. We provide customers several payment methods serve different customer needs which are HCE based NFC payment, payment via QR code, in-car payment, online shopping loan integration with e-commerce companies, tax payment integration with government’s tax platform. We continue to enrich the services of World Pay with new technologies.
End-to-End Digital
Another strategical focus is designing end-to-end digital processes. For instance, we launched digital onboarding process. As Yapı Kredi, we believed that users should be customer easily wherever or whenever they want. As a result, we have implemented “Yapi Kredi Digital Onboarding via video assistants” project via Yapı Kredi Mobile in 2018 as the first in Turkey. Users have already been able to become a Yapı Kredi customer without visiting the branch. However; because of regulations in Turkey, we used to send 1-paper “customer statement” via courier and customers needed to approve it by wet signature even if we completed whole process on digital. With recent regulation changes, we made the process end-to-end digital. Now, they also do not need to wait courier to bring and sign papers to become our customer. All they need to do is verify their identity via Yapı Kredi Mobile and digitally approve required documents. Besides enhancing digital platforms, we have been endeavoring for branch & RM digitalization as well. For example, we started to provide paperless processes on branches for more than 40 products which require heavy paperwork like GPL, overdraft account, insurances etc. with the help of Customer-Faced Screen on branches. Furthermore, we launched Mobile Approval, by which customers can approve product contracts and other documents with the comfort of their own mobile device without need of wet signature on plenty of papers. Our motivation behind launching this innovation was to cut paper waste and to introduce Yapi Kredi Mobile to our non-digital customers so that they could find out the simplest way to execute their transactions. Mobile Approval is made by signing in Yapi Kredi Mobile. Thanks to Mobile Approval, a lot of paper waste has been being avoided and many customers have been stepping into the digital world of banking. This feature also provided customers tremendous help at the time of Covid-19 since we all need contactless solutions more than ever. Also, with the focus on designing end-to-end processes, we designed end-to-end card journey for our customers, which makes visible entire card journey to the customers end to end. Starting with card application, our customers can follow every step of the journey until they receive the card via Yapi Kredi Mobile. Having applied for a card, the customer can view the application status. Once the application is approved, the customer can follow the delivery process. After the card is received, the customer can set a password for the card. This feature enables customers to be in control and experience the journey all the way through.
Expanding Ecosystem
We believe APIs are the most powerful tool for Fintech collaboration and it is one of our strategical focuses. We are constantly scouting the fintechs especially for specific technologies it focus on. It keep track of many different technologies from AI to Open Banking and integrate relevant technologies into our system. Therefore, providing Open Banking APIs was critical for us. For this reason, we launched Yapı Kredi API Portal in 2017 and developments in the API area have been continuing since then.
We offer 56 sets of APIs to fintechs and developers through our API portal. APIs those shared by Yapı Kredi, contains the core banking products, services and transactions.
As the pioneer of digital banking in Turkey, we keep creating end-to-end digital processes and expanding the banking ecosystem using different technologies. However, the trends and technology are just the enablers. “Customer” is our biggest business driver. Therefore, we truly focused on customers’ behavior while creating our roadmap and executing strategic actions.  We are using data and advanced analytics in order to create compelling, personalized and real time experiences. As we primarily focus on customer, we focused on mobility even more, which is one of the core elements of our digital strategy, in order to make our customers’ lives much easier and healthier especially during COVID-19. We keep enhancing digital processes for the best user experience.