Credit Europe Bank NV enhances customer experience with Azure, leaving legacy infrastructure behind

Credit Europe Bank NV was founded almost 30 years ago by Fiba Group from Turkey. Headquartered in the Netherlands, the bank serves close to one million all over the world, with a strong presence in emerging economies. Credit Europe Bank NV has dynamism in its DNA, enabling the company to rapidly respond to changes in the banking sector.

By 2019, Credit Europe Bank NV was grappling with an aging infrastructure. “Generally, there are two limitations with on-premises data centers—hardware and resources. If you have a great idea that you want to scale, you have to order equipment and wait for its delivery. Then, you need a team to handle the cabling, configuration, networking, and switches. With the cloud, this process is significantly simpler,” explains Ulaş Ergin, IT, Digital Banking, and Software Architecture Department Manager at Credit Europe Bank NV. Ergin joined Credit Europe Bank NV to lead the cloud transformation.

Credit Europe Bank NV set out to revolutionize the entire banking experience from its very roots, encompassing both technology and customer experience. Yet, like any organization which deals with sensitive data, Credit Europe Bank NV first did due diligence. “We compared various cloud platforms and Microsoft Azure emerged as the top choice, especially when it came to regulatory compliance,” recalls Ergin. “Additionally, we already had an Azure cloud tenant through our affiliation with the Fiba Group, making the transition even smoother.”

A transformation in efficiency

In less than a year, Credit Europe Bank NV reshaped its dated infrastructure. The timeline is even more impressive, considering that the leap to Azure entailed a learning curve for the bank’s IT teams, who had to familiarize themselves with new processes and technologies. “All our teams, from IT security, DevOps, and network management to software development—,everyone, had to learn new stuff before we could even start the migration,” shares Ergin. “Even with all that time spent learning, we were able to implement the changes within one year.”

Credit Europe Bank NV adopted Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), a managed container orchestration platform, to simplify their operations and speed up development, resulting in smoother resource management and a more efficient environment setup process. “Azure Kubernetes Service revolutionized our operations. Now, resources are available almost instantaneously,” shares Ergin. Teoman Sevinç, DevOps Specialist at Credit Europe Bank NV, adds, “We no longer need to manage the underlying infrastructure, which greatly reduced the operational strain. In the past, if we wanted to make updates to our environment, it would disrupt our non-production setup. But with Azure, managing and setting up environments is streamlined, which positively impacts our development life cycle.”

It’s not just the development team that has benefited. IT management was also streamlined. “Previously, when managing on-premises systems, we had to handle upgrades, security patches, immediate fixes, and regular maintenance. In Azure, many of these tasks are handled behind the scenes, reducing the operational load on our team. Maintenance efforts have been significantly reduced,” adds Ergin.

Credit Europe Bank NV also discovered further opportunities within the cloud, such as using Azure Cognitive Services to enhance the secure handling of customer ID photos. “Achieving this proof of concept on an on-premises solution would've been more cumbersome, requiring collaborations with external partners and substantial data feeding for model training,” Ergin explains.

Migrating from a proprietary relational database management system to the PostgreSQL system was also a breeze. “The ability to set up a Postgres instance within an hour, and then hand it over to the database team, is transformative,” shares Sevinç. “Their response has been overwhelmingly positive. The efficiency we've achieved, where we can configure a database within a day, significantly accelerates our development lifecycle. Using the previous system was quite challenging; the difference is like night and day.”

A transformation in banking experience

Credit Europe Bank NV's efforts have transformed customer experience. "Customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Our corporate customers noted that the system's performance is faster," shares Berkay Çavuşoğlu, Program Manager at Credit Europe Bank NV. “On the retail banking side, the bank has reduced customer onboarding duration from 3 days to 9 minutes thanks to the new digital platform,” Ergin adds. "We now offer a modern, engaging digital banking platform. Everything has been revamped for smoothness and speed, making the whole banking experience more enjoyable. This efficiency gain allowed us to go-live in Switzerland within 3 months time.”

After the migration, the bank was able to offer new features like real-time forex trading. “Customers can now observe live rate changes and execute trades swiftly, a feature previously unattainable with our old system,” shares Ergin.

With the adoption of digital, mobile-based “soft” tokens and biometric authentication, Credit Europe Bank NV has also enhanced security and convenience for corporate clients. “Previously, we would need to send physical tokens via post, which was inconvenient, especially for international clients,” explains Ergin. “Now, with more robust authentication methods, customers can instantly access online banking. About 30 percent of users migrated to soft tokens, indicating the early success of this feature.”

A transformation in Credit Europe Bank NV’s digital horizon

Building upon its cloud success, Credit Europe Bank NV is determined to further leverage the Microsoft ecosystem. Ozgur Koc, Head of Digital Banking, explains; “We are now capable of swiftly developing and delivering new features, allowing for a rapid go-to-market approach. Product delivery and agility are of utmost importance in the financial sector in our decade and we are delighted to have gained this capability by utilizing the Azure Cloud. Our objective is to incrementally build and release new features and products that were previously beyond our reach thanks to our digital banking platform running on the Azure Cloud.”

The journey continues to expand.  "As our trust in Azure grew, we began looking into more ways to adopt Microsoft solutions," adds Ergin. “We started using Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams while SharePoint Online and Exchange Online solutions are just deployed.” Additionally, Credit Europe Bank NV looks to harness the capabilities of GitHub Copilot for its in-house banking system, with preliminary tests yielding promising results.