Exceptional

EY 7 Drivers of Growth: Bulent Tekmen, Ininal
Growth Driver: Customer
Banking for
the unbanked
With Ininal, Bulent Tekmen has found
a way of giving people without bank
accounts access to financial services.
Keeping customers satisfied is at the
heart of the company’s growth.
words Christian Doherty
After graduating from Yıldız
Technical University with a degree
in Industrial Engineering in 1997,
Bulent Tekmen started as a consultant in
a technology services company in Turkey
before deciding to “do my own thing.” In
the following years, he cofounded several
start–ups. While on a business trip in the
US, he wanted to use a debit card but didn’t
have a US bank account. Then he discovered
the prepaid cards that were widely used
across the country and realized that this
form of payment would be useful to some
430 million people who lived in Turkey and
the wider Middle East and North Africa
region — many of whom did not use banks.
He received capital from angel investors in
Turkey and launched Ininal in 2012.
What inspired you to set up Ininal?
Given the large numbers of unbanked people
and businesses in the region, we hoped that
Ininal would become the preferred banking
platform for mobile wallet solutions.
We believe everything can be digitized,
but digitizing money through the banking
system is hard and
expensive. So we were
confident that we could
create a better, secure and
convenient way.
What have you learned
from interactions with your
customers?
The biggest lesson from our
customers was that if you
are transparent with them,
they will support you. At
Ininal, our customer services
stayed open 24/7 and will
always be open. To become a
trusted partner, we must be
very clear about our services and how they
work. Customers expect open platforms on
which they can provide their feedback, and
the efficiency of these platforms will have
a key impact on the success of financial
services providers in the future.
Why was putting the needs and desires
of your customers first so important in
unlocking growth?
We believe that the most reliable route to
success is to convince people through your
users. If you make something that users love
enough to tell their friends about, you will
grow exponentially, and that will convince
any investor. To do this, however, you
need to understand the customers’ ever–
changing behavior and needs and accustom
yourself to these so that you can succeed
in the market. For Ininal, this means that
the customer experience simply must be
embedded into our operations.
What challenges did you encounter as you
tried to grow the company?
The biggest was regulation. Ininal needed
a payment systems and electronic money
license from the Banking Regulation and
Supervision Agency of Turkey. As a financial
services provider, we need to build our
business around a very strong frame that
combines regulatory compliance, technology
and operations. Fraud prevention is also
among the key priorities in this business.
We established our own IT infrastructure
that was compliant with Payment Card
Industry Data Security Standards (PCI
DSS) by migrating some services from
MasterCard to the Ininal infrastructure in
order to gain speed and elasticity for further
product development and new business
lines. We are only the fifth PCI DSS–certified
service provider in Turkey.
What other factors have been key to
Ininal’s growth?
We wanted to provide simple financial
products to unbanked and underbanked
customers by leveraging physical retail
networks and technology. So far, we have
enjoyed strong and sustainable growth.
We have also built a strong network
among merchants, retailers, consumers and
traditional financial services providers. The
Ininal physical card is now being sold and
topped up at 15,000 locations — 10 times
more than the number of branches run by
the biggest bank in Turkey — while our virtual
card can be downloaded from the Ininal
wallet application and used across borders.
Finally, we have made significant
investments in infrastructure, as well as
regulatory compliance and new products, to
produce the building blocks that enable us to
dominate the Turkish prepaid card market.
What will be the next step in
Ininal’s development?
We are expanding our marketing efforts
and increasing the number of users: Ininal
is still growing virally. Starting with all the
big players as preferred merchants, we
hope the network–effect business model
will drive growth.
Then there is the issue of increasing
online spending and the Ininal merchant
ecosystem: our merchant commissions
will grow as the number of online shoppers
grows — indeed, it is thought that the growth
in online shopping will outperform internet
usage growth in the coming years.
Exceptional February–June 2016
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