Kazakhstan’s Halyk Bank has a mobile app that takes care of practically all the public services:
Kazakhstan’s Halyk Bank is a major financial services group, offering products and services in retail, SME & corporate banking, insurance, leasing, brokerage, asset management and lifestyle services. Its total assets stood at Kazakhstani Tenge, or KZT 16,749.9 billion as of June 2024. It has 568 branches, the largest and broadest branch network in the country, and 10.9 million active retail customers and more than 371,000 active corporate and SME customers. Besides Kazakhstan, it also operates in Georgia and Uzbekistan. It celebrated 100 years of operations in 2023.
APP NOT JUST FOR BANKING
Halyk Bank gives top priority in developing customer services and creating high levels of favorable customer experience. For this, the bank has digitized most of its operations. Its retail app, Halyk Super-App, is a unique offering, providing all its customers not just banking services, but several public services – e-government, Halyk Market, Halyk Invest, Halyk Travel, and kino.kz, a portal for information on entertainment. The bank also has mobile apps like Halyk Homebank and Onlinebank, improving accessibility and convenience for the customers.
Halyk Super-App is a convenient platform for customers to make all kinds of payments, including P2P, legal, taxes and even fines. The bank has recently used the app to launch a payment service for car-parking, making use of geo-positioning technology. Using the app, one can find parking locations, and also pay the fare. Similarly, the app is also used in registration of automobiles and one need not go to the transport officers as everything is possible online. Almost all of the customers who are 50 years and younger are using the Super-App for transactions.
The bank had recently implemented Huawei OceanStor Dorado storage systems that enables it to take up high-speed transactions and real-time monitoring. The new system has features like SmartDedupe and SmartCompression which optimize storage space, reducing costs while improving overall efficiency. The bank is also able to adopt remote replication and snapshot technology, ensuring business continuity and 24×7 service availability.
DIGITIZED BRANCHES
While the bank considers branches as the core of its operations, it is the advanced digital banking capabilities available at these branches that its customers are fond of. The bank claims that as much as 90% of its retail loans are issued through digital channels even as it has products like digital performance bonds and credit lines.
Significantly, the bank uses Non-Volatile Memory express, or NVMe network technology which enhances the efficiency of the core tasks and ensures better user experience.
The bank has implemented Microsoft Azure Cloud Services for Application Hosting and Computing Services, especially for its POS and ecommerce business.
DATA FACTORY PROJECT
Halyk Bank had undertaken what is described as a data factory project with the help of DIS Group, a software distribution and IT professional services company focusing on CIS countries. The bank faced issues in mainly increasing its fee and commission income by personalizing offers and stimulating transactional activity, in creating a single space and tools for analytics and AI within the concept of data governance and developing a flexible, scalable data platform to run and test business hypotheses besides implementing AI tools in different work segments. It then conceived the data factory concept, which covered not only the retail business but also corporate and SME business. In its final version, the data factory will be integrated into the processes of making almost all decisions related to interaction with clients: cross-selling and up-selling, risk assessment and anti-fraud, AML and predictive service in the contact center, soft collection and many other banking processes.
The concept is based on a heterogeneous storage built with both proprietary platforms, primarily Informatica products, and innovative open-source solutions. The data therein will be consolidated from all internal corporate and external sources.
10K DECISIONS A SECOND
The bank says today it is able to take over 10,000 decisions every second with the help of the data factory to issue loans on more favorable terms than those of competitors and to prepare individual offers of banking products and bank ecosystem products in terms of the credit history and current state of the customers, including their behavioral characteristics and individual preferences.
Like the modern-day banks, Halyk Bank is more of a software company than a bank. It aims to be a virtual part of the lives of its customers – for, today its customers can even register a birth or marriage using the bank’s mobile app. Digitization has enabled the bank to be the ultimate convenience for its customers.
It has a highly integrated database with that of the government, thereby enabling it to provide most of the innovative services online. Yet, the bank is rooted in tradition, for it continues to have its physical branches in rural areas servicing every type of citizen, most of them lacking the sophistication of the urban customer or deprived of financial literacy.
This article has been compiled based on publicly available information on the web, particularly the bank’s own website.
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