Halkbank accelerates digital banking with Riverbed | Aternity solutions

Halkbank, Turkey’s third-largest bank by assets, is deploying Riverbed’s unified Network Performance Management (uNPM) solution, which includes Riverbed AppResponse. This will help bank deliver near-perfect digital service availability and monitor its critical Internet banking and mobile banking applications.

During the epidemic, Halkbank’s mobile banking client base grew at an exponential rate, going from one million to 2.5 million in a matter of months. Riverbed | Aternity gives real-time network visibility and actionable data insights to the bank, allowing it to immediately rectify any performance issues and provide customers with the best possible digital experience.

“Mobile is our most-used channel, followed by Internet banking and physical branches,” explains Namık Kemal Uçkan, Head of IT Operations at Halkbank.

He added, “While we knew we could scale to handle the increase in traffic, we needed to increase the capacity  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.”

“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.

“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,” added explains Mena Migally.

Halkbank has 16.5 million customers, including four million digital users, 23,000 workers, and over 1,000 branches, making it one of Turkey’s major banks. The bank’s IT team of 1,000 highly skilled employees works relentlessly to preserve a competitive edge by ensuring a flawless client experience and preserving a competitive edge through technology. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, forcing clients to use more digital channels, the bank realized it needed to extend its mobile banking systems to accommodate more than twice the amount of traffic.

Halkbank has been a Riverbed | Aternity customer for over ten years, with over 1,000 branches using Riverbed SteelHead for WAN Optimization to improve network and application performance. Riverbed Network Performance Management, which incorporates Riverbed AppResponset, has now been deployed to monitor the 40+ essential apps that power the company’s financial and online banking services. In one situation, Riverbed | Aternity assisted the bank’s networking team in determining that the difficulties impacting the banking platform were code-related, allowing the issue to be quickly escalated to the software development team. The solution is one of several that have been connected with the bank’s IT management platform, giving the team real-time insight of the network and apps and automatically producing alerts when problems develop.

Halkbank intends to implement more automation and investigate AIOps in order to keep its competitive advantage. Riverbed’s unified Network Performance Management tools will assist the IT staff in better managing networking data and events correlation while also maintaining network visibility.