We restructured our business processes to dynamically respond to the new customer needs that have been transformed during the pandemic. Maximum efforts were given to fulfill all kinds of requests and expectations of our customers in the quickest manner possible through our digital products and services delivered online and via mobile channels. Our adaptation to the radical changes during the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of enhancing the digital capabilities on self-service channels has been much easier thanks to our mobile application, which we are continuously keeping up to date with fresh improvements. We aim to expand our product range which we sell through our mobile branch and raise the engagement level in this channel. We also try to find new ways to strengthen and deepen our bond with our existing customers by making the essential technological developments with the right focus on omnichannel strategies.

First release of the new version of our mobile app went live on April 2020, when almost all the financial institutions were physically unable to operate due to the accelerated pace of the pandemic. Uncertainty about health as well as financial assets was rather prevalent all over the world. Distant sales processes via digital channels suddenly turned to be the priority on the agenda of each business because consumers tended to seek remote solutions to meet their needs. We had been working on a new version of our mobile branch long before the pandemic period, but it was just about time since self-service channels became more vital than ever. That’s why we released several versions after the first one, taking the feedback from our customers as well as the changing needs shaped by the long-lasting pandemic period into account.

We were always aware that the mobile application of a life insurance and pension company might seem to offer limited features when compared to the application of a bank, let’s say. Since there is less interaction in terms of number and variety of transactions, banking applications are quite more appealing. Customers might as well log in several times a day to the banking applications whereas this is usually not the case for mobile branches of pension companies, like ours. However, we also knew that customer touchpoints of all types of businesses were converging to a digital axis. This had been, the key driving factor behind our focus on developing a renewed mobile application with the best performance we could ever achieve. Our mobile application was renewed on the basis of the latest trend user experience standards by using the most up-to-date software language on both IOS and Android.

Our main purpose was to develop a much faster mobile branch so, backend services totaling up more than 140, were developed as REST API's in microservice architecture to improve the performance. All work and effort were practiced by a project team composed of internal resources within an agile working model. We designed our mobile app as a user-friendly, time-saving, and easy-to-use application which is not only new and modern enough to attract the young segment among our customers, but also simple enough to not to deter our older customers from using our application. Since the renewal, our customers can manage their private pension and life insurance products quickly and practically through our mobile app. Moreover, we have enabled to login without the need to enter password for the users of our parent company’s mobile banking app by implementing the single-sign-on technology to expand our customer reach.

Up until now, 426,199 unique mobile banking app users have visited our application with direct transfer thanks to app-to-app integration made with our parent company. As of March 2021, we located our app as a post-login sales channel and began to sell our products through it. Eight of our products from private pension and life insurance branches, are available for our customers to be purchased in approximately 5 minutes. By doing so, we managed to increase our online sales by 38% between 2020 – 2021, and the unique customer number has increased by 35%. Our app was also appreciated by users with its current achievement of 4.9 points on Appstore and 4.5 points on Play Store, which is ranked above many financial applications. We are constantly improving our mobile application and publishing updated versions, according to the comments and feedback coming from our customers.