Digital transformation is not anymore merely an option for organizations. It has become a means to future-proofing their business and improving the customer experience, employee capabilities, operational efficiency, and business economics. Financial institutions are increasingly realizing the significance of going digital and thus, are embracing digital transformation.
With a mission to enable financial institutions to become digital leaders by delivering world class customer journeys in digital and assisted channels, VeriPark, a global solutions provider for financial institutions, was incepted. With the help of VeriPark’s end-to-end seamless customer experience solutions, financial institutions get the chance to drive more engaging interactions with their customers or partners by capturing their needs, gaining personalized insights, and placing customers at the core of their digital transformation and innovation.
Founded in Turkey 22 years ago, the company now has offices in 15 countries worldwide, from Asia over the Middle East and Europe to the Americas, serving clients in more than 30 countries. Since its inception, the company is helping its clients to turn their processes into digital environments. It works collaboratively with clients to develop innovative technology strategies and solutions, touching millions of people every day and bringing the promise of digital transformation to life.
Comprehensive Offerings
For financial institutions to go digital, they must have solutions in four areas i.e. Omni-channel Delivery, Customer Engagement, Branch Automation, and Loan Origination. VeriPark is helping financial institutions by providing proven, secure and scalable solutions in these four areas to enhance their customer acquisition, retention and cross-sell capabilities. Let’s have a look at its top-notch solutions.
VeriChannel: A financial institution must have an omni-channel strategy with a customer-centric approach. As a reliable and scalable platform for Omni-channel Banking, VeriChannel sits on top of existing IT systems and allows for a secure, zero footprint integration with disparate business applications. VeriChannel offers a secure, unified platform that empowers organizations to manage seamless, consistent and engaging customer journeys across multiple customer touch points, including web, mobile, kiosk, and even ATMs.
VeriTouch: VeriTouch is a vertical Customer Engagement (CRM) solution built on top of Microsoft Dynamics 365, optimized with industry best practices that enable financial institutions to place customer relationship management at the core of their digital transformation journey.
VeriBranch: VeriBranch provides a unified frontend, that empowers branch staff to transform themselves into universal bankers while supporting contactless customer journeys in the digital branches. It gives banks all the tools to transform their branches into high-value sales centers. It leverages technology to empower branch staff and deliver unparalleled customer satisfaction. The solution enables bank employees and technology to work together, with the right information at their fingertips to execute transactions.
VeriLoan: VeriLoan is a powerful end-to-end digital loan origination, servicing and collection solution built on top of Dynamics 365. It allows managing the entire customer lifecycle in one, unified CRM platform. Covering everything from pre-screening, onboarding, risk and credit review, underwriting, disbursement to collection, VeriLoan automates the entire retail, commercial and corporate loan processes from start to finish.
VeriLink: VeriLink is the Common Integration Layer providing out-of-the-box request / response schemas used by VeriPark’s implementations and by other third party front-end and internal systems for integration with the host and core banking systems.
VeriPark is the only company in the industry to provide omni-channel, customer engagement and origination capabilities in a single platform. This is what makes VeriPark a preferred choice for financial institutions to go digital.
A Proficient Leader Leading by Example
One of the inceptive minds of VeriPark is Özkan Erener, co-founder and CEO of the company. Ozkan brings an enriching experience in building delivery channels and CRM systems for retail and corporate banks, to the table.
Özkan was born in 1970 in Turkey and graduated from Electronics Engineering at Bosphorus University in Istanbul. He co-founded VeriPark at 27 years old and has been heading the company snce then, leading by example. He is actively involved in designing the product roadmap of the company. Under his leadership, VeriPark has emerged as a global player dedicated to FSI with 800 employees, operating in 15 countries.
Ozkan believes that the banking industry is going through significant changes with the arrival of digital banks, cloud, blockchains, and similar areas and believes it is a great time for entrepreneurial initiatives in the industry. He advises emerging entrepreneurs, who aspire to venture into the banking industry, to focus on clients’ needs in terms of digitalization, as there is a dire need to do so. Most banks are already well equipped to compete against established banks, but are in need of technology to face the emerging digital neobanks. For now, that is a great recipe for success for entrepreneurs.
It’s all about Reimagining and Reinventing
The coronavirus crisis has forced many banks to shift to home working. Some customers and employees may be longing for things to ‘return to normal’ but others are finding it difficult to imagine going back to how things were. It’s likely that some traditional ways of banking will (and probably should) change for the better. Many banking leaders are realizing that their teams can do much of their work productively at home. For the foreseeable future, we are all going to have to live and work with some form of physical distancing. VeriPark has the digital banking solutions to ensure bank employees can work from home, stay safe and be available to meet the needs of their retail and business customers, both via digital and assisted channels.
COVID-19 has transformed the way billions of people live, work, shop – and manage their finances. According to VeriPark, in the midst of all the confusion and anxiety, proactive banks have the opportunity to emerge as a source of comfort, hope and security for their customers.
How financial institutions deal with the challenges in the “New Normal” will not only define the future of their brand; it will significantly affect their customers, employees and the wider economy. To be digital-ready for a post-COVID-19 world, organizations will not only have to build resilience, but also reimagine and reinvent their strategies and operations.
Banks Embracing Digitalization
According to Özkan, it is necessary for financial institutions to align their offerings with newer technological developments, especially when it comes to digital banking or financial mobile apps. He says “The customers are adopting digitalization so fast. If banks are not present where the customers are, they will sometimes not be very meaningful to them. They will have to adapt to what the customers are using.”
With that said, Ozkan is also of the opinion that banks have always been good in adapting to new technology. To exemplify this, he recalls the time when we were only sending simple SMS messages to each other, instead of texting or chatting. But, with the arrival of all the messaging apps, we are now having significant conversation over WhatsApp with each of the heavy conversations lasting for multiple days. Now, we are witnessing banks carrying out such kind of text-based conversations, chat-based conversations, financial eligibility discussions, all happening on such kind of automated, bot-driven conversations. This shows how bank have been good in following the technology and their customers. If their customers are now spending more time looking at Facebook rather than other apps, then banks have started promoting their offerings over there.
A Roadmap Ahead
VeriPark is now a +800 people organization, working with clients in more than 30 countries and continues to expand its wings. Every week, the company has conversations and meetings with almost 100 different banks from Asia to America. Through these discussions, it is understanding how they are reacting to government financing for COVID, how they’re reacting to their clients not coming to branches etc. VeriPark is extrapolating all these interviews, demands, challenges, and concerns, and translating those insights into its product suite.
The fact that VeriPark is focusing into a wide geography is bringing the company an enormous competitive advantage. For example, the fact that we were able, many years ago, to help a bank onboard customers via video for a project in a country which had just introduced new regulations enabling video-based onboarding, gave us a massive advantage in other markets recently, VeriPark’s exposure to different continents and continuous engagement is enabling the company to serve the right clients. Its attempt to solve and enhance their digitalization journey brings a very interesting competitive advantage for VeriPark when it is approaching clients in other countries.
Ensuring Customer Satisfaction
“VeriPark has been a valued strategic business partner both before and during this pandemic. We have loved working on many successful projects together. For example, we have built an award-winning infrastructure for all of our digital channels with VeriPark’s framework. We have also renewed our retail and corporate internet banking and mobile banking channels with the latest technology, and we achieved that together in just one year. We built our CRM program from the ground up; we are currently running a pilot system, which we will analyze and develop further. We are also about to start our Robotic Process Automation (RPA) journey with VeriPark.”– Esra Beyzadeoglu, Alternatif Bank Executive Vice President Information Technologies, Digital Banking and Operations
“Our retail customers started using our contact center and digital channels much more. If we didn’t have these capabilities in place, we would have had a lot of issues; it would have been chaotic. Our corporate customers also found they could do everything they needed to do using our mobile app. The reason we were able to do all this was down to the digital investments we had made with VeriPark. In fact, we were called upon to share our knowledge and digital CRM capabilities in other jurisdictions across Africa, where it became mandatory for all banks to implement similar processes for tracking customer interactions and customer issues. We have already deployed all the VeriTouch CRM modules and they are being used 100%. Soon, we will be launching the Next Best Action (NBA) module. NBA is focused on using sophisticated rules, analytics and algorithms to better predict customer needs and in turn offer more relevant actions and offers leading to improved wallet share and loyalty. It requires a lot of data, but will ensure our front-line teams have the customer insights to cross sell and serve our customers even better.” – Adewale Salami, Chief Technology Officer, FirstBank, Nigeria
VeriPark | CEO | Özkan Erener
