Türk Ekonomi Bankası (TEB)
            

Türk Ekonomi Bankası (TEB) is a renowned institution on the Turkish banking scene. Established in 1927, it has a large network of branches and a diversified range of products and services. Specialized in investment, leasing, factoring and portfolio management, TEB is one of the major market players with an asset size of TL 221 billion as of March 31st, 2022.

The bank has rolled out an entirely new process architecture with ARIS. This gives it a centralized process architecture, including a central process repository, and the ability to design processes and workflows across the organization on one platform.

But in 2018, it was clear more work was needed. On the outside, a new breed of customer with a 24/7 omnichannel banking habit was growing. And stiffer compliance legislation was rife. On the inside, IT complexity was mounting with the deployment of more modern systems and applications to digitalize the customer experience. And—most concerningly—a large portion of the business was blind to process management with no visibility over control points under its responsibility, roles or reporting capabilities across units and projects. Processes simply weren’t aligned to procedure and people.

Six process hierarchies in just two years

But with a foundational process architecture in place, TEB could quickly set to work remodeling and restructuring its processes to align IT to the realities of the business. The next step here was mapping them from end to end and exposing them to pretty much everyone. Fatih Çelikel, BPM Director, TEB explains: “Ultimately, we wanted to remodel all processes across the six hierarchies of our business, which ARIS easily enables. For ease of deployment, we focused on hierarchy 1 first. We remodeled all core business processes, clarified roles and responsibilities, and developed reporting functionality. And then we simply moved on to the next hierarchy. Getting all the approval flows signed off across a highly big and complex organization was a headache, but we could manage the process with ARIS easily.”

In under two years, the bank modeled 1,030 end-to-end processes, and 2,235 process diagrams (including sub-levels) were published. The bank’s “process inventory” was created based on the BRSA* process inventory. And by 2020, all products and procedures were mapped to processes.

5 to 9,000 in just two years

Then came the third phase:
“With our processes remodeled, we weren’t willing to stop there. We wanted to integrate our new processes with different platforms and applications and then expose that information to the whole bank. It’s incredible. We’ve gone from having five process designers to 9,000 business users—all able to view the processes that apply to them and corresponding analytics,” says Ayşin Yılmaz, Business Practices Coordination Manager.

And the benefits are really starting to be felt:

1. Uniting the business behind a single source of truth: the whole bank is able to view dashboards, charts, reports and analytics. With a customized UI available on the company’s intranet portal, ARIS is the window to the company’s operational soul. If the company has to pivot with a new service or product, all stakeholders know what’s involved and can see the impact on them. This is visibility breeding agility for a modern bank. And it’s great for onboarding. New recruits can see immediately which business activities and processes they are responsible for and access all associated SOPs.


2. Unlocking operational excellence: With its new business process management platform, TEB is on target to set objectives that measure its operational excellence. With every role, system and process helping to deliver value to its business and customers, it has started to compare its “as is state” with its “to be state,” which is providing the basis for process design and enhancement projects.


3. Risk and compliance: Logically a lot of this new intelligence is being ploughed into assessing the company’s regulatory compliance. And if—on the fly—it has to be evidenced, it can do this fast, using legal reporting tools. Currently the bank is taking this a step further, working on the connection of ARIS to its governance, risk and compliance tool. Now it can analyze risks and vulnerabilities, because its process architecture is open and integrates seamlessly with 3rd-party solutions.

With its next objective in sight—providing direct ARIS access through all core banking systems—TEB is analyzing to get a view on areas of its IT landscape. Feedback has been that anything’s possible for an organization with process models this detailed, well-governed and efficient. Great job for a bank just five years off its centenary!