Riverbed | Aternity has announced that Halkbank, the third largest bank in Turkey in terms of assets, is using Riverbed’s unified Network Performance Management (uNPM) solution including Riverbed AppResponse, to help the bank deliver near 100% availability of digital services and monitor its critical Internet banking and mobile banking applications.
During the pandemic, Halkbank experienced exponential growth of its mobile banking customer base, which rapidly scaled from one million mobile customers to 2.5 million within a few months. Riverbed | Aternity provides the bank with network visibility and actionable data insights in real-time to resolve any performance issues quickly and to ensure an optimum digital experience for customers.
As one of Turkey’s largest banks, Halkbank has 16.5 million customers, including four million digital customers, 23,000 employees, and more than 1,000 branches. Technology plays a significant role in providing a seamless customer experience and maintaining a competitive edge, which the bank’s IT team of 1,000 highly skilled staff diligently works to maintain. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and customers were forced to use more digital channels, the bank recognised the need to scale its mobile banking platform to handle more than double the volume of traffic.
“Mobile is our most used channel, followed by Internet banking and physical branches,” explains Namık Kemal Uçkan, Head of IT Operations at Halkbank. “While we knew we could scale to handle the increase in traffic, we needed to increase the capacity of our network performance management solution to ensure we could identify network issues before they risked disrupting services and impacting our reputation. Our goal is to provide 100% availability for all services, so we needed a solution that helps us be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to network management.”
Halkbank has been a Riverbed | Aternity customer for over 10 years, having deployed Riverbed® SteelHead across more than 1,000 branches for WAN Optimisation to accelerate network and application performance. The company has now rolled out Riverbed Network Performance Management which includes Riverbed AppResponse to monitor the 40+ critical applications underpinning its financial and online banking services. The solution is one of many integrated with the bank’s IT management platform, giving the team real-time visibility of the network and applications and automatically generating alerts when any issues arise. In one case, Riverbed | Aternity helped the bank’s networking team identify that the issues plaguing the banking platform were code related, so they could route it to the software development team for speedy resolution.
“There’s no other product that can find the root cause of issues faster than Riverbed’s Network Performance Management solution. With automated alerts, mean-time-to-resolution is almost at zero. We can see an anomaly as soon as it happens and resolve it before it impacts service. This actionable insight really does ensure optimum performance and a great customer experience. Thanks to Riverbed | Aternity, we’ve had no downtime at all on our mobile platform over the past two years, despite more than double the volume of traffic,” added Uçkan.
As the company works to maintain its competitive edge, Halkbank is planning to roll out more automation and explore AIOps. Through all this, Riverbed’s unified Network Performance Management capabilities will help the IT team to better manage networking data and events correlation as well as continuing to unlock visibility of the network.
“Halkbank is a shining example of a financial institution that accelerated its digital transformation to capitalize on the explosive demand for digital banking,” explains Mena Migally, Regional Vice President, META at Riverbed | Aternity. “Riverbed | Aternity is proud to have helped Halkbank achieve full-fidelity visibility which provides them with rich, deep data across their network and enables them through actionable data intelligence to proactively mitigate performance issues, eliminate application downtime and improve the digital experience for all their customers and employees.”
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