Taking both sectoral expectations and technological developments into account, Ziraat Bank identified seven key objectives and incorporated them into its 2015 roadmap.

Aware that corporate progress is a never-ending journey, Ziraat Bank continues to grow, develop, and advance together along with its employees and customers.

Ziraat Bank continues to proliferate and advance the gains that it is achieving through the Change and Transformation Project that Ziraat Bank launched in 2012 in order to turn itself into a superior-quality service provider and solution partner capable of satisfying all of its customers’ financial needs.

Ziraat Bank’s goal is to craft effective solutions that will make it possible for its customers to satisfy all of their financial needs within the Ziraat Finance Group no matter what global or sectoral conditions may be.

As it moves forward, the Bank’s intention is to ensure that the Ziraat Finance Group is capable of serving customers in every segment in three basic business lines: Corporate Banking, Mass Banking, and International Banking. In order to achieve this strategic goal, the Bank identified seven key objectives and laid out the 2015 Roadmap taking both sectoral expectations and technological developments into account. These key objectives are discussed briefly below.

1. Sustainable Customer Relationship Management: Ziraat Bank will focus on cultivating value-creating, sustainable relationships with all of its customers.

In 2015 the Bank once again continued to build value-creating, sustainable relationships with customers in line with its principle of achieving customer experience excellence in every channel through which it comes into contact with customers.

Uninterrupted efforts continued to be made to develop new products and to improve existing ones so as to better address customers’ financial needs. One example is the spot loan product that we introduced for our corporate customers. Another is the www.evinziraatten.com website that we launched to help retail customers get detailed information about home-ownership financing, find answers to any questions they may have about such matters, and learn what residential development projects Ziraat Bank has entered into financing agreements with.

“Başakkart”, the bank-card product originally introduced for the agricultural sector, has been expanded so as to additionally embrace the needs of those in the entrepreneurial and corporate banking segments in keeping with Ziraat Bank’s intention to play a role in every aspect of commercial life. An important step was taken in the direction of improving the experience of foreign-national customers at Ziraat Bank branches by adding English, German, and Russian language options to the branches’ paging systems. By incorporating smartphone-connectivity into branches’ queue paging systems, our mobile banking customers can now reserve a queuing number for themselves in the nearest or whatever Ziraat Bank branch they want. Ziraat Bank is the first bank in Turkey to introduce an appointment system that allows customers to make an appointment at a branch so that they do not have to wait and can take care of their banking business as soon as they arrive.

Efforts continued in 2015 to further enhance the customer experience in all branch and non-branch channels through “channel optimization” projects undertaken to provide customers with effective banking service through every channel. Continuous improvements were made in the functionality of our online, ATM, and mobile banking channels to benefit both our retail and corporate banking customers. Online branch customers are now able to define flexible as well as fixed transaction limits (transaction amounts and counts) according to their particular requirements. Thanks to recently introduced innovations, online banking customers can view the status of checks and notes that they have received and/or sent to the Bank for collection on an individual branch basis; and they can also now close accounts through the Ziraat Bank Call Center. A multichannel integration project has been initiated in order to standardize service quality so that customers may be sure of receiving a consistently high level of service quality across all of our delivery channels.

Under the “Limitless Banking” project that was initiated in 2015, conceptual and physical modifications were undertaken at more than 200 branches in order to make it easier for physically-challenged customers to access financial products and services. Ziraat Bank has also introduced a “Limitless Banking Support Package” that brings together an assortment of banking products that address the special needs of such customers.

In order to come up with faster and more effective solutions addressing customers’ needs, the existing customer communication infrastructure was strengthened and a new call center was opened in Samsun.

Ziraat Bank continued to expand its branch network in 2015 in a drive to broaden its customer reach. In addition to a new branch in Pristina, Kosovo, 112 domestic branches were added to the Bank’s network bringing the total number of national and international branches to 1,812 as of year-end.

Happy to work with all segments of society and recognizing that its mission involves standing by its customers in bad times as well as good, Ziraat Bank allowed customers affected by disastrous floods in the Black Sea counties of Hopa, Borçka, Murgul, and Arhavi to reschedule and defer repayments on loans that they had taken out from the Bank.

2. Institutionalized Business Processes: Productivity will be increased through business process institutionalization as well as through continuous improvement and development.

Increases in productivity achieved through the Bank’s transformation process are amplified through medium- and long-term corporate sustainability practices so as to further bolster Ziraat Bank’s strong national market position while also enhancing its global competitive strength. Efforts focused on contributing to Turkey’s sustainable development are carried out under the leadership of Ziraat Bank’s CEO in coordination with the Bank’s Strategic Guidance Committee.

Ziraat Bank’s first sustainability report, which includes the Bank’s 2013 operations, received an A+ rating from the Global Reporting Initiative. The second report, comprising the Bank’s 2014 operations and which, thanks to the dedicated efforts of all the units involved, was prepared in full compliance with the requirements of G4 comprehensive reporting, has also been published on Ziraat Bank’s corporate website. Recognizing its fundamental duty to conserve natural resources, Ziraat Bank helped reduce paper consumption by not publishing a hard-copy version of its 2014 sustainability report.

Seeking to achieve end-to-end digitalization of all of its business processes, Ziraat Bank continues to work with public institutions such as Turksat, TOKI, Turkvet, and the Public Notaries Association to integrate their functions into its own.

Under the heading of enterprise architecture, projects have been initiated to effectively integrate all of the Bank’s business, data, and application architectures and technological infrastructure. In order both to model business processes and IT processes so as to operate compatibly with one another on a common platform and to increase the interaction of business processes by providing input for software development, work began in the last quarter of 2015 to develop management systems that will be integrated into the processes of Ziraat Teknoloji, a member of the Ziraat Finance Group.

Ziraat Bank is continuing its intensive efforts to expand its international service network.

3. Integrated Subsidiary Management: Ziraat Bank will seek to increase synergies among its domestic and international subsidiaries and affiliates and international branches through expansion of the Ziraat Finance Group.

The newest addition to the Ziraat Finance Group is Ziraat Katılım Bankası, which joined in the second quarter of 2015 in order to more effectively address the different financial product and service needs of its customers. Work is currently in progress to set up Ziraat GYO, a bank-owned real estate investment trust.

Ziraat Bank is currently working on other projects whose aim is to expand its international service network both increasing the number of branches it has in its existing operational territory and by opening new international branches and/or financial services subsidiaries in target markets. The most salient of such targets have been identified by Ziraat Bank as those markets which have developed significantly in recent years, which have deep-rooted historical and/or cultural ties with Turkey, and in which Turkish investors are already active or there exists a potential for them to become so.

In line with the Ziraat Finance Group’s efforts to enlarge its international presence, the Bank’s Pristina branch located in the capital of Kosovo commenced operations in the second quarter of 2015. Having completed their own incorporation processes, Ziraat subsidiaries in Azerbaijan and Montenegro officially began doing business in the third quarter of the year. Ziraat Bank’s operations at 97 locations in 18 countries meant that it commanded an international presence more extensive than that of any Turkish bank as of end-2015.

In keeping with its international banking strategy and vision, Ziraat Bank will continue to:

• Increase its effectiveness in every country in which one of its subsidiaries or branches has an operational presence
• Take part in efforts to expand commercial and economic relationships between such countries and Turkey
• Play an increasingly stronger role in and take an ever-bigger share of their foreign trade finance
• Respond to the banking product and service needs of Turkish investors in these countries
• Provide customers with fast, superior-quality, solution-focused products and services
• Increase the effectiveness of the synergies among the Bank, its local subsidiaries and its offices abroad, within the context of the fundamental Ziraat Finance Group approach.

Under the heading of renovating the core banking systems of its international subsidiaries, new banking software became operational in Bosnia-Herzegovina in February 2015. Work on a similar project that began at the Bank’s German subsidiary is scheduled for completion in the first quarter of 2016.

4. Operational Excellence: Ziraat Bank will be a bank which can rapidly adapt to technology and whose operations are highly digitalized and centralized.

In 2015 Ziraat Bank once again continued to work on projects to improve and centralize business processes in order both to reduce branches’ operational workloads and so that branches may spend more and better-quality time with customers and thus more accurately identify customers’ financial needs and develop solutions that more effectively address them.

As a result of a project undertaken jointly with the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre, it has been possible for mortgages on real estate properties to be released electronically by the Bank’s headquarters since March 2015. Ziraat Bank is the first and still the only bank in Turkey with this capability.

With the introduction of Aztec (data-matrix) codes on checks, an important step has been taken towards reducing the risk of fraud.

Work is continuing on a joint Ziraat Bank - TOKİ (Mass Housing Administration) project to systematize data communication between the two. The aim of this project is to permit TOKİ-related operations to be processed at every Ziraat Bank branch, thereby reducing the workloads of the limited number of branches currently authorized to handle them. Work is also continuing on another project that eventually will centralize all such operations.

In the first quarter of 2015 a project was initiated concerning the allocation and collection of loans out of special-purpose government funds which Ziraat Bank handles but does not originate. The goal of this project is to standardize, simplify, and centralize such lending processes so as to reduce the workloads they impose on branches.

The centralization of all lending processes also continued apace in 2015. Ziraat Bank regards this as the most crucial component of its overall business process centralization efforts, the aim of which is to reduce branches’ operational workloads. The project got under way in 2014 with the headquarters centralization of all contract-related processes. Current efforts are focusing on centralizing credit-collateralization processes. The project will be completed with the centralization of credit-disbursements sometime before the end of 2016.

The final stage has been reached in Ziraat Bank’s e-archive project, the aim of which is to ensure that all archivable documentation that is generated or received is retained in electronic format in a manner that ensures both its long-term security and its convenient accessibility. This project is slated for completion during the first quarter of 2016. Besides reducing Ziraat Bank’s financial and operational costs, the electronic-format archiving of documents will also increase the long-term security and usefulness of the information they contain.

While operational efficiency is being improved through the automation of these and similar processes at branch, regional, and headquarters units, efforts are also being made to shift existing operational personnel to more customer-focused tasks and functions. Between 2012-2015, a total of 3,754 labor saving has been achieved and these employees were reassigned to sales-oriented positions.

The scope of e-learning and mobile training functions was expanded in order to make information accessible to more personnel faster and at a lower cost.

5. Objective and Transparent HR Management: Ziraat Bank will ensure the sustainability of its business model both by improving its existing employees’ skills and by also being a center of attraction for new talent.

Ziraat Bank has set up a performance management system whose aims are to strengthen its customer-focused business model, to inculcate a sales- and productivity-focused work ethic, to motivate employees and thereby enhance their loyalty to the company, and to reward individuals whose success is consistent with the Bank’s objectives. The scope of this system is currently being expanded to embrace headquarters units as well.

Efforts have been initiated to expand the scope of e-learning and mobile training functions in order to make more information more accessible to more personnel faster and at a lower cost. It is planned to have this process completed as of the first quarter of 2016.

The Ziraat Bank Banking School, an institutional hallmark in banking industry education and training, is once again turning out young bankers who espouse the Bank’s vision and strategies after reopening its doors as of the third quarter of 2015. The school currently has an enrollment of 119 specialist assistants: 98 from Ziraat Bank and 21 from its Ziraat Katılım Bankası subsidiary.

In 2014 a Competency Evaluation System project was begun with the aim of making it possible both for employees’ target-based performance to be measured and for assessments of their skills to be integrated into their performance score. Under this project so far, the competencies required for branch, regional, and headquarters units have been identified and training programs have been designed so as to be compatible with the results of the competency evaluation process. The Competency Evaluation System will become operational as of 2016.

6. Effective IT: Ziraat Bank will take maximum advantage of the opportunities afforded by technology in order to secure a competitive advantage.

Work continues on information technology infrastructure and IT hardware replacement projects that were initiated in order to make effective use of technology both to ensure that all operations can be conducted without interruption and also to optimize costs.

Work that was begun in 2014 to renovate Ziraat Bank’s data center continued in 2015.

In the last quarter of 2014 a project was initiated to set up a central software testing team to ensure that software under development is tested effectively.

The central software testing team’s testing and certifying software for compliance with international standards is underway.

Under the heading of banking software improvement: a project was initiated in 2014 to simplify screen layouts and make them more ergonomic. In 2015 this work continued with the unification of associated screens and the design of more user-friendly menus.

Another important project that was undertaken in 2015 in line with Ziraat Bank’s Effective IT objective is the development of core banking software in light of the Bank’s business model and strategies. Once infrastructure design work has been completed, the first new screens will go into use during the first quarter of 2016.

7. Strong Balance Sheet: Ziraat Bank will continue to transform its balance sheet to make its structure more customer-focused while also managing expenditures without hindering revenue growth.

The principle of equity-compatible balance sheet management continued to be an important source of guidance for the strategic decisions that were made in 2015.

In order to increase the diversity of its funding, Ziraat Bank renewed its syndicated loan.

A Corporate Expense Management module has been installed in the Bank’s IT system. This module, which became operational in the first quarter of 2015, is designed to allow expense and stock management to be performed more effectively and to exploit cost advantages. Work to further expand the capabilities of this module is currently in progress