Excellence in leadership in CEE 2020: Halyk Bank

Awards for Excellence 2020

Kazakhstan’s banks faced a difficult challenge in the first two months of the pandemic. When president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced a state of emergency on March 16, he also unveiled plans to provide a support payment of KT42,500 ($106) to all citizens economically affected by the pandemic.

The catch was that these payments had to be delivered via bank accounts, either online or via cards. In a country with low overall banking penetration and even lower usage of digital channels, this put a huge burden on the banking sector – and particularly on Kazakhstan’s largest and most trusted lender, Halyk Bank. 

The bank stepped up to the challenge. Within six weeks, it had opened new accounts for more than 300,000 clients, as well as seeing uptake of its digital services for the first time by more than 500,000 existing clients. 

“In the first two weeks of quarantine we developed the ability to onboard clients remotely, which was a major challenge,” says chief executive Umut Shayakhmetova. “Our IT people were working nearly 24 hours a day to create and test all the new services we put into our home banking platform, and all the changes had to be approved by the management team via Zoom.” 

The challenge was not only logistical but also educational. Many of Halyk’s new and existing clients, particularly older customers and those in rural areas, were resistant to digital banking. 

“Many don’t trust it, don’t understand how it works or forget their passwords,” says Shayakhmetova. 

To combat this, Halyk undertook a big education effort in the first weeks of quarantine. 

“We issued video manuals to explain how digital banking works via all our channels – SMS, our website, Facebook, Instagram etc,” says Shayakhmetova. “Even so, we received a lot of queries via our call centre as people were very cautious.”

While Halyk was unable to persuade all its customers to go digital, by mid May some 80% of payments and client services were via remote channels – a big achievement in a very short time frame and a testament to the bank’s technological capabilities.