Yapı Kredi, the third-largest private bank in Turkey, has steadily expanded its use of robotic process automation to improve software quality, operational resilience and speed across its banking operations.
Headquartered in Turkey, the bank serves 9.7 million active customers through 835 branches nationwide and delivers services across retail, corporate, commercial and SME banking, supported by subsidiaries in asset management, brokerage, leasing and factoring, as well as international operations in the Netherlands, Malta and Azerbaijan.
With total assets of TL 534.7 billion as of the end of 2024 and more than 16,000 employees, Yapı Kredi operates at significant scale. This prompted early recognition within the bank that many repetitive, rules-based activities could be automated to reduce manual risk and improve consistency across systems.
Initial candidates included credit card operations, where transactions had to be defined both in core banking platforms and external card networks such as Visa and Mastercard. These early automations began as early as 2018, as the bank experimented with different automation approaches.
A year later, in 2019, Yapı Kredi hired global software firm UiPath as its strategic Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform. The bank encouraged operational teams to take ownership of automation, forming its first RPA team from business staff rather than IT specialists.
“We encouraged our operations team to learn robotic process automation,” explained Erkut Baloğlu, executive vice president of process and program management at Yapı Kredi.
“The first RPA team was formed of 4 operations personnel who willingly went online, in their spare time, and learned to train robots by themselves,” he said, stressing that “this self-motivated and self-learning team is the main factor of sustainability.”
That model has since scaled into a dedicated team of eight specialists from backgrounds including operations, mathematics, statistics, finance and engineering, Baloğlu continued.
Early deployments focused on customer care, operations and consumer credit, automating data collection from multiple internal and external systems to give staff a single, consolidated view.
For QA and testing teams, these automations reduced manual hand-offs and improved consistency in data handling across systems.
In customer care, robots now gather account and transaction data automatically, significantly reducing the time agents spend navigating systems. Tasks that previously took around 10 minutes can now be completed in a fraction of the time, freeing employees to focus on higher-value customer interactions and sales activities.
Robotic testing
The value of automation became even more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic, when regulatory requirements and customer needs shifted rapidly.
Yapı Kredi used robots to test and implement changes quickly, in some cases deploying RPA as an interim control layer before core IT systems could be modified.
Robots were used to support regulatory controls, overnight reconciliations and transaction monitoring, as well as to process customer requests such as credit cancellations through the mobile app, allowing compliance-critical workflows to be implemented at speed.
As RPA matured, the bank moved into a phase where robots and humans worked together more closely. Employees became accustomed to approving robot-executed transactions, while robots reconciled transactions initiated by humans, creating a two-way control mechanism that improved auditability and reduced operational risk.
“We plan on leveraging the ‘triangle’ of the human employee, AI and RPA.”
– Erkut Baloğlu
More recently, Yapı Kredi has begun layering artificial intelligence on top of RPA to support more complex QA and audit use cases. In internal audit, the bank has introduced AI-driven document understanding and image processing, with robots acting as intelligent assistants.
Auditors define the audit scope, robots collect and process documents, AI algorithms perform signature and consistency checks, and exceptions are flagged for human review.
This shift expanded audit coverage from samples of 50 to 100 files per branch to full populations, while releasing around 15 per cent of auditors’ time for higher-value analysis.
“The next stage is to add artificial intelligence on top of the robot, and human employee by developing a work-sharing approach,” said Baloğlu.
“AI is good at interpretations, humans are the decision-makers while software robots will act as assistants to humans, allowing them to concentrate more on risky and value-added tasks.”
Today, Yapı Kredi operates 20 unattended robots across 137 processes, with seven workflows combining AI, robots and human oversight. Robots enabled more than 2.2 million transactions, and the bank expects volumes to continue rising as it moves further towards intelligent automation.
“We plan on leveraging the ‘triangle’ of the human employee, AI and RPA,” Baloğlu emphasised. “AI will be able to conduct image processing and document recognition, the robots will automate the repetitive tasks and the employee will perform tasks that require decision-making.”
He concluded by saying that “we know that if we want to see more benefits, we need to expand the use of RPA and that is exactly what we plan on doing.”
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