Dexia’s Turkish
subsidiary DenizBank has great expectations and big ambitions to
establish itself as a leading lender in the innovative Turkish
retail banking market. Two DenizBank senior vice-presidents tell
Duygu Tavan how the bank plans to grab the lucrative potential of
Turkey’s tech-savvy population.
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When you are Turkey’s 7th biggest private bank and one of
your closest direct competitors has taken Turkish banking
innovation to international levels with the launch of the world’s
first digital card and then snapped up a rival to become the
country’s sixth-largest private bank – your growth ambitions will
not be plain sailing.
But DenizBank is not
downhearted. With a €250m investment from its parent Dexia,
DenizBank is expected to generate one-third of Dexia’s 2014-pre-tax
income by 2014 and grab a chunk of the lucrative potential from the
youth and affluent segments in Turkey. Both segments already have
their own micro-site and specific products, such as the Paso Bonus
card for the youth segment and Affluent Bonus Platinum card with
discount and cash-back incentives.
Now DenizBank has launched
its very own mobile payments service at the end of June and is
anchoring its sector penetration, both in specific retail segments
as well as with a 
strategic
alliance with the Turkish post office.
The bank will issue both a
contactless credit and a prepaid card both from Visa and
MasterCard. The card number can then be ‘added on’ to a Turkcell
SIM card. The service is compatible with Samsung’s NFC-enabled
Galaxy device and Turkcell’s own T10 mobile phone and available as
an app on the iPhone. Alternatively, consumers can use an add-on
antenna.
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By GlobalDataThe service will initially go
live with MasterCard, but Visa will follow shortly thereafter, says
Enis Tuna, DenizBank senior vice-president (SVP) for card payment
systems marketing. This in itself is of course no novelty, at least
not in the Turkish banking sector.
Yapi Kredi partnered with
Visa Europe and Turkcell for iCarte, a contactless mobile payment
service for Turkcell’s iPhone customers in 
February. The
launch of the iCarte came less than two months after rival Garanti
rolled out an antenna-equipped SIM card mobile payment service that
integrates wireless near field communication (NFC) in co-operation
with MasterCard and Turkish mobile phone operator Avea.
DenizBank’s service will
allow prospective consumers to apply for a card by sending an SMS
to a particular Turkcell phone number. If the application is
successful, they can retrieve their prepaid or even the credit card
immediately from Turkcell’s stores.
DenizBank’s entrance into the
growing NFC space follows its deal with Mobinex in May to develop
mobile banking applications for the bank, titled DenizBank
SifreTek.
Murat Erdag, SVP for self
service channels management at DenizBank, is confident that his
bank will become a leader in direct channels.
“There are works in
progress,” he says, but is reluctant to reveal details.
DenizBank has already
upgraded its online banking platform in March and is employing
Turkish TV personality Beyaz as the face of the avatar
technology-based channel. The bank has also finally grasped the
influence of social media – it is in urgent need to increase its
presence on those platforms, in particular Facebook, where Akbank’s
pages was ‘liked’ 421,698 times, Garanti’s 434,530 times and even
TEB’s 11,971 times. DenizBank has registered well under 1,000
‘likes’ to date.
Erdag promises big campaigns,
but remains vague. “I cannot talk about particular campaigns, they
are commercially sensitive. But we will target social media
engagement in 2011 aggressively,” he insists.
DenizBank’s physical market
penetration levels are expected to soar thanks to its deal with
Turkish post PTT (which does not have a banking license): PTT has
1,150 ATMs, 4,600 branches and about 13m customers, but no open
banking license. The deal is for three years.
“1,500 of their branches are
in areas with low or no banking branch, so a huge part of PTT’s
customer base has no access to a real bank. And many of their
customers have no banking relationship,” Tuna says.
DenizBank is thus offering
three product in this deal: A debit card with an overdraft account,
a credit card and multipurpose loans. About 1.6m of those cards
have been printed and credit cards will be issued in
July.
“Our target is to issue fourm
overdraft account-linked debit cards initially and onem new
customers,” Tuna says.
By the end of 2011, it aims
to become Turkey’s fifth largest lender by assets.
“There are two more big projects to come – hopefully in
around October,” Tuna adds.
