With a young population and high cell phone usage, Turkey is the ideal market for mobile banking. The country’s technology-savvy consumers want convenient, user-friendly banking services that are available at the touch of a button. As a result, banks that innovate rapidly and effectively have a golden opportunity to seize market share and raise revenues.
Garanti BBVA is a company with a long history of pushing the boundaries of the Turkish banking sector. Specifically, Garanti BBVA Technology is responsible for many technological firsts in the region.
Umut Arslan, Unit Manager at Garanti BBVA Technology, explains: “We were one of the first banks in Turkey to launch internet and mobile banking and are the leader in the market now. With new startups emerging, it is vital that we don’t let the pace of innovation drop. To protect our competitive edge and keep surprising our customers, we must continue to introduce exciting new features and services.”
Enhanced efficiency
Increases developer efficiency by up to 25% by boosting productivity
Process simplification
Simplifies audit process by consolidating to a single development pipeline
Behind the scenes at Garanti BBVA Technology is a diligent team of developers who work tirelessly to bring the bank’s pioneering vision to life. The company recognized that by investing in the developer experience, it could enable both short- and long-term benefits.
“Unlike other geographies, Turkey’s young population is producing new developer talent at an impressive rate,” says Arslan. “To attract the most enterprising minds and retain our existing developers, we wanted to provide access to user-friendly development tools. We have a huge code base in IBM Z, and the IBM z15 platform is critical to our operations. But there was a gap between the open-source environments that many new developers are familiar with and our IBM Z development toolset.”
To support a DevOps strategy at Garanti BBVA Technology, the company chose to deploy the IBM® Developer for z/OS® Enterprise Edition solution, an advanced, comprehensive toolset for developing and maintaining IBM z/OS applications.
“We engaged IBM to help spur our DevOps plans into action,” recalls Arslan. “In just three days they compiled a detailed report explaining their recommended next steps. It was just the catalyst we needed.”
Next, an engineer from the IBM DevOps Acceleration Program visited Garanti BBVA Technology onsite for two weeks. In that time, the IBM and Garanti BBVA Technology team undertook two proof of concept workshops to explore the functionality offered by IBM Developer for z/OS.
“Working with IBM, we understood how IBM Developer for z/OS could help us converge the worlds of IBM Z and open source,” says Arslan. “IBM’s support throughout this project has been excellent: the IBM team is always available and responsive.”
Garanti BBVA Technology’s developers adopted the new IBM technology with ease. Today, the team no longer has to switch between toolsets when working on different applications. And with the help of an in-house coded migration pipeline, they were able to speed up migration from their host-based library manager to a modern source code management (SCM) tool.
“IBM Developer for z/OS Enterprise Edition includes tools for every development language in use at Garanti BBVA Technology, enabling a consistent experience and saving valuable time,” comments Arslan. “We’ve consolidated to a single, modern DevOps pipeline, and the built-in editors helped our developers familiarize themselves with the new toolset very quickly.”
Using IBM Developer for z/OS, Garanti BBVA Technology is raising the speed, quality and agility of development. This contributes directly to the pace of innovation at Garanti BBVA, helping the bank to maintain its edge over competitors.
“We estimate that IBM Developer for z/OS has increased our developers’ efficiency by up to 25%,” says Arslan. “We’ve dramatically accelerated our development and testing phases and we encounter significantly fewer bugs. Our DevOps team spend less time resolving minor issues and more on strategy. All this is helping us protect our leading position in the marketplace with groundbreaking new banking services.”
Garanti BBVA Technology is also reducing risk by enabling a wider range of developers to work on its systems. By investing in better, more consistent developer experiences, the company enhances its appeal to current and potential employees. Arslan explains, “With help from IBM, we’re able to keep attracting top talent by staying ahead of industry standards.”
By consolidating to a single development toolset and pipeline, Garanti BBVA Technology has also simplified the audit process. The company can now expend fewer resources meeting regulatory demands.
Arslan concludes: “IBM Developer for z/OS has helped us take control of our DevOps tools, giving us immediate insight. Next, we’re planning to work with IBM on end-to-end traceability of the coding process, which will give us more opportunities for optimization. After that, we’ll focus on testing automation. At Garanti BBVA, we’re proud to be early adopters, and our strategic relationship with IBM will help us maintain that approach.”
As Turkey’s second largest private bank, Garanti BBVA (link resides outside of ibm.com) operates in every segment of the banking sector, including corporate, commercial, payments, retail, private, investment banking and beyond. Established in 1946, Garanti BBVA employs more than 18,600 people to provide services to over 19 million customers.
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