VakıfBank - Innovation in Technology Development

Company: VakıfBank
Company Description: VakıfBank has commenced its operations on the 13th of April 1954. At its inception, the Bank’s mission was to set as managing and utilizing the assets of foundations in the most efficient manner in line with the needs of the economic development, contributing to Turkey’s increasing savings rate based on a management and working understanding aligned with the requirements of modern banking.
Nomination Category: Technology Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Award for the Innovation in Technology Development - Financial Services Industries

Nomination Title: Digitalization of Litigation Processes

VakıfBank has 935 branches in Turkey. VakıfBank is the third largest bank in Turkey with its 16,755 employees and 5.000 ATMs.

Ever since its inception in 1954, VakıfBank has been contributing to Turkey’s increasing savings rate with modern banking practices and applications, which carries out significant work aimed at the growth and development of the national economy. With the Digitalization of Litigation Processes; Execution processes and court processes, the subject of which is the consumer transaction and VakıfBank is the borrower party, have been made possible through the VakıfBank Innovative Transformation (VIT) program instead of being carried out manually by the branches.

By ensuring that these processes are carried out in the VIT environment, the operational load of the branches has been reduced. In this way, operational errors and risks that VakıfBank may be exposed to during court and execution processes were minimized and access to healthy information and reports became possible.

The project, which was completed and implemented between April 2019 and January 2020, is a modern banking practice.

Using the workflow method and document saving systems, automatic documentation is created and documents are circulated within the flow. Since automatic financial transactions are integrated with the reporting structure, automatic SMS / E-Mail / Mail are sent to customers about the customer, file and amount information of the transactions. Likewise, e-mail is sent to branches automatically. In addition, automatic e-mails are sent to track the last response times of the records sent to the branch/units for comments.

With the integration of the National Judiciary Informatics System, files are constantly updated and documentation is received. The mutual technical system is also used to process the record sequentially in the operational teams.

Thanks to the project, the quality of the process increased with the transactions subject to approval.

By ensuring that the system works integrated with the return screens in the VIT environment, duplicate payments have been largely prevented.

While verification of lawsuit and enforcement file information is ensured with National Judiciary Informatics System integration, customers and institutions are automatically notified via SMS / E-Mail / Mail.

Since the enforcement and court proceedings are managed by our branches, we cannot specify the Branch effort exactly. However, It was anticipated that operational processes take approximately 1 day for our branch personnel in each transaction such as determination of expenses especially in transactions made by our branches, obtaining a file cover account from the enforcement office, going to the authorization of the scoring, making manual calculations regarding the withholding deductions made in the payment of the counterparty attorney fees and requesting a self-employment receipt from the lawyer, issuing free vouchers, payment on a separate screen. And they also stated that they spent 1 day for a transaction in oral interviews with the personnel. Operational processes that are handled manually by branches are mostly automated and centralized, and their transaction times are approximately 30 minutes.

Centralization of enforcement and court proceedings has been put into use with a pilot application, and centralization has been achieved actively on 1 October 2020. The number of transactions in our application is also given below:

Number of Execution and Court Transactions
Completed – 4297
In Review – 607
Open - 805
Grand Total - 5709

The detailed operation of the system is explained in the presentation included in the application documents.