Garanti Bank Integrates Mobile Banking With Social Media

Garanti Bank in Turkey announced the launch of its mobile banking feature that connects with various social media sites to allow customers to make money transfers to friends and family.

Garanti is one of the largest private banks in Turkey and has been working on creating solutions to help make mobile banking more appealing and user-friendly for customers, reported Banking Technology.  The Turkish bank is hoping to benefit from the growing social media craze and developed a service called “iGaranti”: a mobile banking service that operates through Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Compared to other countries in Europe, Turkey is reasonably advanced in terms of mobile banking adoption, which, according to the bank, is a strong indication that social media integration will continue to encourage Turkish consumers to bank on-the-go.

“Our customers are becoming more connected, and we need to meet them where they are – in the right way, at the right time – across all of our channels,” said Didem Dincer Baser, executive vice president at Garanti. “Fjord’s expertise in mobile technology and user-centered design has enabled us to bring this vision to life. iGaranti aims to be a contextual banking application which can be used by anyone, whether a Garanti customer or not.”

IGaranti services were created with the help of the design consultancy Fjord, which is a subsidiary of Accenture. The solution encompasses 23 mobile applications, which includes services such as mobile wallets, savings, loans and customer programs. Additionally, the solution offers hands-free voice control to facilitate money transfers. People can use the mobile wallet to pay in-store, to withdraw cash or to use QR codes for money transfers.

Garanti serves about 12 million customers across the country, and the bank hopes that the ability to send payments via social media networks will help mobile banking ignite. Integrating these financial services onto social media accounts will also give users better control with account activity and money transfers, particularly with friends and family connected on such sites.

“The future of banking isn’t about anonymous high street branches, it’s about banks fusing financial expertise with technology to personalize the relationship between customers and their money,” said Mark Curtis, chief client officer at Fjord to Banking Technology. “The iGaranti service from Garanti is shaping the future of the banking experience by making banking on the go more accessible and compatible with digital lifestyles. It’s an inspired transformation of a traditional service and I’m confident we’ll be seeing more banks follow suit in the future.”

To read the full article at Banking Technology, click here.