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Stating that Akbank sees fintechs as business partners, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Innovation Burcu Küçükünal said, "We follow start-ups and technology companies as well as fintechs."

16 September 2020

Stating that Akbank sees fintechs as business partners, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Innovation Burcu Küçükünal said that they are open to working very closely with the ecosystem. Küçükünal, who was a guest of the Financial technology program on Bloomberg HT television, stated that they are looking for cooperation opportunities with fintechs and other start-ups in the ecosystem to develop better customer experiences. Küçükünal, "Fintechs are one of our partners. We have an opportunity to test an idea and offer value-creating solutions to a wide range of customers with the help of these collaborations. We continue producing ideas together in a win-win business model for both sides. We saw this partnership area as an opportunity from the beginning. We were not in the 'let's do everything ourselves' perspective. Banks have strong infrastructures to handle this; but it is a priority for us to evaluate a collaboration on issues like speed, agility and strategic-fit."

'WE TOUCHED MORE COMPANIES WITH THE HELP OF REMOTE WORKING'
Underlining that Akbank Lab is suitable environment for bringing our employees with innovative projects together to support creativity, Küçükünal continued: "Now we started to work remotely. We were thinking about how this period will affect creativity and innovation; but now we could touch more companies. "

Emphasizing that one of the aims of establishing Akbank Lab is to increase the competence of digital innovation, Küçükünal said that they follow start-ups and technology companies as well as fintechs. Stating that they are following the recent developments closely, Küçükünal said, "At the same time, we are trying to make smart cooperation in accordance with our strategic focus and strengthen our innovation process."

'WE CONTACTED WITH MORE THAN 100 FINTECHS'
Noting that they have been in contact with more than 100 fintechs and have worked with more than 20 of them, Küçükünal said, "Here, like in our machine learning cases it is very important for us to have advanced analytics behind every solution we bring together with our customers, and to be able to process the data in the most meaningful way. For this reason, there have been projects we have implemented especially in the field of artificial intelligence. Now, we work on both loans and insights based on financial planning that we offer to our customers. We are pleased to be working with both our external partners and our colleagues on these projects.

To watch: https://bit.ly/3c6YzdD