DenizBank: Putting customers at the center with an innovative banking platform powered by Anthos
About DenizBank
DenizBank is the fifth-largest private bank in Turkey, with 12,000 employees, and a presence in Austria, Russia, and Bahrain. Its mission is to add value to its customers' lives by using technological innovations to unify physical and digital services. In 2015, DenizBank was named "Global Innovator of the Year.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usUsing Anthos, DenizBank easily scales its private-cloud application environment to innovate faster and meet demand, saving time for its IT team while providing a more stable banking app for customers.
Google Cloud results
- Enables powerful enterprise-grade scaling, while complying with Turkish banking regulations to safely store customer data in Turkey
- Offers a stable production environment, thanks to automatic upgrades and patching, for a more reliable application
- Improves IT service quality by giving full-time staff more time to monitor and make adjustments during peak times
Up to 5x traffic easily managed during holiday peaks
With a relatively young population of 84 million people (on average, citizens are around 30 years old) and the global trend toward online banking further accelerated in 2020 due to COVID-19, Turkey is experiencing growth in the demand for online services. Meanwhile, DenizBank, one of the five largest private banks in Turkey, is committed to using innovative technology to improve its customers’ experience.
In 2012, it established the first digital banking department in Turkey, offering groundbreaking products and services for its customers, such as the ability to make transactions through their social media accounts. Working with its subsidiary, InterTech, DenizBank has been developing digital solutions to give its customers even more ways to control their finances and to help other banks and financial service providers do the same.
"Our goal is to create an integrated and compliant banking platform that puts customers at the center of what we do. With Google Cloud and Anthos, we’ve gained powerful functionality and operational efficiency on the back end of our software to give customers the best possible experience."
—Dilek Duman, Chief Operating Officer, DenizBankOne of these solutions is a web-based banking platform called InterVision, developed at a time when most core banking functionality was only available within bank branches. The InterVision platform now offers more than 100 software products, which include core banking, customer relationship management, business process management software, mobile and internet banking, and ATM software. In addition to DenizBank itself, more than 50 banks in 11 countries make use of the platform.
With a growing number of software services and customers, DenizBank needed to make its InterVision services run more efficiently, while managing banking regulations in each of the 11 countries it serves. To ensure compliance with Turkish data storage legislation, it needed to keep Turkish services in an on-premises private cloud. At the same time, in order to innovate in a hybrid environment, the company was keen to start hosting applications on Google Cloud to benefit from the ease of managed Kubernetes clusters on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and gain enterprise performance. For a hybrid and multi-cloud solution that delivers the benefits of GKE, while meeting its regulatory requirements on-premises, DenizBank turned to Anthos.
"Our goal is to create an integrated and compliant banking platform that puts customers at the center of what we do," says Dilek Duman, Chief Operating Officer at DenizBank. "With Google Cloud and Anthos, we’ve gained powerful functionality and operational efficiency on the back end of our software to give customers the best possible experience."
"With Anthos, scaling our Kubernetes clusters up and down is really easy. On an average day, we handle one million logins, while during the national holidays, it can be four or five times that amount. Today, we never have to worry about meeting demand."
—Dilek Duman, Chief Operating Officer, DenizBankScaling easily with Anthos to take the stress out of holiday peaks
Dilek first came across Anthos at Google Cloud Next ‘19. "We were immediately interested, because we saw how Anthos could help us manage our systems efficiently and grow," she says. "We were among its first beta customers, and Anthos delivered on its promise from the start." The system Dilek had in mind for Anthos was DenizBank's Turkish mobile application architecture, which is hosted on a private cloud. The application offers customers a broad range of functionalities from their pockets, from a branch finder and mobile banking, to the ability to open a new account using the app.
In early 2020, InterTech moved DenizBank's Turkish mobile banking solutions to Anthos, receiving support from the Google Cloud team along the way. "Google Cloud collaborated with us from the beginning, helping us to put the correct settings in place, ready to scale," says Dilek. "As the environment has grown, we haven’t had to reconfigure it."
DenizBank's mobile banking application, managed using Anthos, now handles two million transactions per day. As it easily scales to meet demand, DenizBank's Turkish customers benefit from a reliable application experience. "With Anthos, scaling our Kubernetes clusters up and down is really easy," says Dilek. "On an average day, we handle one million logins, while during the national holidays, it can be four or five times that amount. Today, we never have to worry about meeting demand."
"We’re saving time and money by using Anthos, because it scales easily and takes care of security and upgrades. We've redeployed two full-time employees who were previously managing peak times to more value-added roles, and we believe that more opportunities like that are on the way."
—Dilek Duman, Chief Operating Officer, DenizBankSaving time and focusing on better services and innovation
Since migrating to Anthos, it has become a simpler process to patch and upgrade the DenizBank Turkish mobile banking environment. That means the IT team is able to spend more time on improving its services for customers and staff. "We’re saving time and money by using Anthos, because it scales easily and takes care of security and upgrades," says Dilek. "We've redeployed two full-time employees who were previously managing peak times to more value-added roles, and we believe that more opportunities like that are on the way."
DenizBank and InterTech are now planning to implement Anthos for other banking software customers in Turkey and use it as part of multi-cloud solutions in locations where it's possible to use public cloud. "And of course, if Turkish regulations change, we'll look at the possibility of using a hybrid private and public cloud solution in Turkey," says Dilek.
For the moment, DenizBank is working on reconfiguring all its InterTech banking software to use microservices, to make it easier to manage and scale. It is also interested in using Google Cloud AI services such as Text-to-Speech for Turkish and other languages.
"Cloud-based technologies are the future for our business," says Dilek. "They enable us to provide our banking software customers with online banking services according to their exact preferences, without having to make unnecessary customizations. They will then be able to focus on innovating to serve their own customers. That's better for everyone."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About DenizBank
DenizBank is the fifth-largest private bank in Turkey, with 12,000 employees, and a presence in Austria, Russia, and Bahrain. Its mission is to add value to its customers' lives by using technological innovations to unify physical and digital services. In 2015, DenizBank was named "Global Innovator of the Year.”