Akbank Accelerates Marketing with Agile Analytics

Akbank is one of Turkey’s largest banks, reporting a net profit of TL 4,854 million (~ USD 1,387M) and assets of TL 295 billion (~ USD 84B) at the end of 2016. The bank’s consolidated capital adequacy ratio of 14.2 percent, calculated according to Basel III standards, is among the highest in the sector. In 2016, Akbank was voted as the “Bank of the Year in Turkey” by The Banker, deemed the “Best Bank in Turkey” by Global Finance, and the “Best Bank in Central and Eastern Europe” by Euromoney. The company has also been named “Most Valuable Banking Brand” in Turkey for the fifth consecutive year in the international brand valuation company Brand Finance’s survey.
Financial Services.
Campaign Analytics, Data Integration, Data Analytics.
Analytic cycle times covering the bank’s numerous marketing campaigns were reduced from five days to five hours.
In the highly volatile global environment in 2016, the Turkish economy continued to grow strongly, led by private consumption and investment spending. This presents a tremendous opportunity for Akbank to grow its business and invite furious competition for banking services for consumers, private clients, and corporate customers.
To execute on its pledge of sustainable return on equity of at least 15-17 percent, the customer-facing side of Akbank faced four key challenges:
At the heart of Akbank’s strategy was to increase the agility of their marketing and sales campaigns to provide the proper offers and messages at the right time to prospective new clients and existing customers. With 90 different marketing campaigns running simultaneously, Akbank’s existing architecture posed many challenges to achieve their desired agility:
Because of these complexities, Akbank could only measure their marketing campaigns’ performance monthly and only then make adjustments to improve results. This certainly was not agile, and according to Attila Bayrak, Chief Analytics Officer at Akbank: “Our inability to see results while campaigns were running prevented us from making adjustments as needed. We needed a platform that would allow us to change the strategy while in the game, not after it is over.”
To deliver the desired agility, Akbank required a big data platform that would consolidate their disparate data sources, speed the time to insight, and eliminate errors. Datameer delivered with:
Akbank used Datameer to deliver the desired agility with the marketing campaigns. Because of Datameer, analysts and campaign owners could see results daily and make required adjustments on-the-fly to increase their campaigns’ performance. Specific results include:
faster analytics
hours of coding saved a year