2014 SUSTAINABILITY REPORT
CEO’s Message
We have a broad and diversified customer base ranging from farmers who make a living in our country’s towns and villages and whose agricultural endeavors create value for all of us to corporate customers whose exports contribute to the national economy, from the SMEs that are the backbone of our economy to people engaged in every sort of occupation. The products, services, and solutions that we provide to this huge group ourselves and through the subsidiaries that make up the Ziraat Finance Group shape the future of our country as much as they do its present while our strategic decisions and actions contribute as much to the efficient functioning of markets as they do to economic stability.
One of the fundamental innovations that we have achieved under the heading of our sustainability-related efforts is that, as a result of a comprehensive study that takes into account the views of both our internal and external stakeholders, we have identified a set of sustainability priorities that we believe will affect Ziraat Bank’s success in the future as much as it does today.
On the basis of our prioritization findings, details of which are presented in the appropriate sections of this report, market- and customer-focus rank foremost among the issues that are of key importance to Ziraat Bank’s performance. This result, which is the shared opinion of our stakeholders, coincides with the fundamental objective of the strategic transformation program that our Bank has been conducting for the last three years. That is because, given the competitive conditions that prevail nowadays, a service provider’s sustainable future and strong performance are possible if and only if there also exists a strategy which puts one’s customer at the focal point of everything and which seeks to maximize the value that one proposes to offer.
In addition to market- and customer-focus, our prioritization study also revealed that our rich array of banking products and services, our extensive geographical reach and degree of customer access, and our diversified deposit base also rank high among the reasons why customers prefer Ziraat Bank. Other issues cited by our stakeholders as being as crucial to Ziraat Bank’s future performance as to that of the present are: specific support for agriculture as embodied in Ziraat Bank’s mission, provision of services to the SMEs and entrepreneurs who are so important to the national economy, safeguarding customer data, and effective corporate governance and risk management in a manner that also embraces sustainability management.
The priorities that emerged from this study are important not just for our Bank but for all of the members of the Ziraat Finance Group as well. These findings will serve as our guide when shaping our roadmap and strategies in the period ahead and will also play a significant role in further strengthening our ability to create added value.
This year Ziraat Bank once again concentrated on integrating its sustainability approach into all aspects of its banking business. As a result of the efforts made in line with this, Ziraat Bank further developed its banking products and services, introduced innovative new products to the market, streamlined its service processes and made them more efficient, and–most important of all–came up with new solutions that addressed its customers’ needs. While continuing to develop our organizational structure in response to current needs and expand our service network, our primary focus was on making additional improvements in our customers’ service experience.
What individuals and companies alike demand is banking-market products that are easily accessible, understandable, comparable, and consumer-friendly. For this reason, Ziraat Bank engages in an ongoing effort to satisfy that demand for every customer segment in every business line in which it is active.
Similarly the new internet banking modules which we recently brought online and which we are continuing to develop have been received with high levels of customer appreciation and satisfaction. Each and every product, service, and process that we digitize by integrating technology into every aspect of our business processes achieves tremendously important gains for us in terms of improving our resource efficiency, environmental performance, and overall productivity. Besides enabling us to make the best and most productive use of our resources, this approach also leads to substantial savings in our costs.
In 2014 we launched our “Banking Without Barriers” project, whose aim is to give our customers with disabilities a better and more comfortable banking experience and which we believe to be extremely important in terms of its social benefits. We are focusing our attentions on giving such customers more convenient access to our banking products and services through such means as physical changes at our service venues, call buttons, Braille-equipped information panels, specially-designed ATM units, and an online branch that can be used by the visually impaired.
In 2014 we completed worthy projects aimed at managing not just our carbon footprint but our entire ecological footprint in the best and most efficient way possible while also achieving significant savings in the process. One of the most important inputs that a bank uses is paper. The digitalization projects that we have been conducting over the last few years have led to extremely important gains and enabled us to achieve substantial savings in paper consumption. Similarly and as a result of changes that have been made, we have achieved notable improvements in water, electricity, and natural gas consumption in the conduct of our headquarters services operations.
All of the activities which I have summarized here we see as being important progress towards the fulfillment of our sustainability goals and we therefore regard 2014 as a year in which we advanced surefootedly in the direction of making Ziraat Bank a more customer-focused bank.
Thus it gives me pleasure to say that the progress we achieved throughout 2015, demonstrates our commitment to fulfilling our promise to be “Turkey’s oldest new bank”. The results that we have achieved– particularly in terms of customer- and market-focus–show that we are making sound progress consistent with our goals and that our customers, who make up our core stakeholder group, are demonstrating an ever-greater preference for the Ziraat brand.
Recognizing that change is a never-ending journey and aware of the need to constantly renew itself and adapt to today’s tough competitive environment. Ziraat Bank continued to advance together with its stakeholders in 2014.
The Change and Transformation Project that Ziraat Bank launched in 2012 reached a new stage in 2014 that may be summed up by its “Moving Forward Together” watchword. The efforts to implement the infrastructural change and corporate transformation components of that project will continue in the future as well.
The goal of the Ziraat Change and Transformation Project is to shepherd the Ziraat Finance Group’s essential Corporate Banking, Branch Banking, and International Banking operations into the future and finalize the group’s global transformation. Under this project, our Bank’s sustainability priorities are rooted in the principles of sound customer relationship management, institutionalized business processes, operational excellence, objective and transparent human resources management, effective information technology, and of course a strong balance sheet. That being so, efforts were made in line with the Annual Strategic Roadmap, which was laid out to guide the bank towards its strategic goals and which is overseen by the Strategic Steering Committee, and enduring value was created as a result.
With respect to integrating globally-accepted sustainability principles into our business processes, we will be continuing to add environmental and social risk-management criteria to our lending processes and to undertake new projects in order to incorporate a wider range of dimensions into our structural development.
Having been a leading and trend-setting industry actor for a hundred and fifty-two years, Ziraat Bank intends to remain one in the future as well. Our Bank calls upon the strengths of its extensive service network, professional management team, strong corporate governance, in-depth market acumen, unrivalled knowledge and experience, and-most important of all-rock-solid brand as it continues to shape the future.
Both the banking industry as a whole and the other domains of financial services in which the subsidiaries that make up the Ziraat Finance Group are active in particular necessarily interact with the swiftly changing and evolving demands of the global and national economies.
The rapid developments to which we are witness today clearly point to the birth of a new global economic balance. That process will continue to affect not just our country but our business as well. At the same time, we regard all of the top issues on the world’s sustainability agenda-but especially the impairment and misuse of natural resources together with climate change and global warming-as both risks and opportunities for both Ziraat Bank and its stakeholders alike.
Today we stand more ready than ever to work with our stakeholders in order to properly manage our risks and business opportunities and to make use of both in order to power our performance. We regard 2015 and the years that follow as a crucially important period in which our potential will impact on our performance. We intend to continue engaging in a multidimensional effort in line with our sustainability priorities and to generate increasingly more synergies throughout the Ziraat Finance Group. In this way, we will also be creating increasingly more value that we can share with our stakeholders and with our country as a whole.
In closing and speaking both personally and on behalf of the Ziraat Bank Board of Directors, I want to thank our employees for the efforts that are the enduring source of our performance, our customers for preferring to do business with us, and our other stakeholders for their confidence in the Ziraat name.
Very truly yours,
Hüseyin AYDIN
CEO
