Yapı Kredi Bank: a pioneer in commercial digital account opening

Winning corporate clients with great onboarding

A webinar hosted by ebankIT and Qorus reunited banking executives and industry experts to discuss digital account opening and onboarding strategies as well as share insightful use cases from various markets. 

Burcu Gültekin, Digital Marketing and Customer Acquisition Manager at Yapı Kredi, explains how the bank has been a pioneer in its market regarding onboarding and digital customer account opening practices. 

In 2021, Yapı Kredi Bank paved the way for digital commercial customer onboarding in Turkey, becoming the first to launch the service on the day of the directive. The speaker emphasizes the importance of complying with regulations while also enabling complex processes and mentions the potential use of artificial intelligence and video agents for onboarding solutions.

In 2021, the digital onboarding regulation became effective in Turkey, and this was a milestone for the banking sector. It removed the barrier to acquiring new customers online and has since unleashed incredible potential.

- Burcu Gültekin, Digital Marketing and Customer Acquisition Manager at Yapı Kredi.

Successful account opening strategies for banks

In Europe, banks are expanding onboarding processes to offer cross-sales options for personal loans, credit cards, and overdraft accounts, aiming for deeper customer relationships. 

In Portugal, they have gone through three generations of digital onboarding, with the latest wave involving a public authentication mechanism for retail customers, leading to fully automated account opening and product suggestions.

Tracey Williams, Senior Design Director at ABSA Group shares how the lengthy and complex home loan application process in South Africa has been transformed through digitalization, enabling automatic credit scoring, document validation, and property valuation. The shift from efficiency to personalization is highlighted with the use of analytics and tools to engage customers effectively and support them throughout the home-buying journey.

Enhanced customer documentation validation for account opening

There have been challenges but also advancements in validating customer documentation for digital account opening. Experts highlight that institutions are investing significantly in advanced KYC technology to remove friction and improve the onboarding process.

As self-onboarding is expected in the coming years, banking executives' ultimate goal is to enable clients to onboard on weekends without needing to contact the bank directly.

However, using self-authentication and the emergence of deep fakes pose a significant challenge in detecting fraud and ensuring customers’ authenticity.

Nuno Reis, IT Director for Architecture & Transformation and Data & Insights at Millenium BCP, shares that the bank uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), including generative AI, to ensure the accuracy of customer addresses and correlate them with other data. 

41.7% of respondents have already adopted facial recognition technologies, which facilitate faster and more secure customer verification and authentication.

- Decoding the Customer Lifecycle: Optimal Strategies and Technological Trends in Banking for 2025 Report, ebankIT & Qorus.

The banking industry is expected to focus heavily on fraud detection and prevention over the next two years.