Democratising Prepaid Cards with Socio-Digital Transformation Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2024

The VakıfBank Corporate Prepaid Card Infrastructure Digital Transformation project aims to digitalize and democratize social aid processes. It addresses inefficiencies in the bank-institution-cardholder triangle by creating a unified digital platform. Objectives of the project include streamlining aid distribution processes, reducing operational costs and workload for all parties, enhancing accessibility and ease of use for aid recipients and minimizing dependencies on physical bank branches and IT teams. In detail:

- Digital Transformation: Fully digitalize social aid processes, minimizing manual operations. - Process Efficiency: Automate aid processes to save time and labor, optimizing resource usage. - Rapid and Effective Aid: Ensure quick and reliable aid distribution to those in need. - Process Democratization: Enable institutions to perform operations independently. - Operational Efficiency: Reduce workload on bank staff, allowing focus on core activities. - User Experience and Satisfaction: Provide a user-friendly system for institutions and cardholders. - Security and Authorization: Implement differentiated authorization levels for secure usage. - Scalability and Accessibility: Ensure system usability across different regions and institutions. - Social Impact & Responsibility: Facilitate faster access to social aid funds, especially in emergencies. - Market Growth: Expand customer base and increase market share through new acquisitions.

This project was inspired by the need for more efficient, transparent, and accessible social aid systems in an increasingly digital world. It was initiated to tackle key challenges in social aid distribution such as delayed aid and accessibility issues for potential card holders, operational costs for banks and inefficient communication and increased workload for institutions.

The most dramatic use case was on the earthquake. There was severe earthquake in Turkey on February 6, 2023. It was a devastating earthquake and thousands of people are in need of aid in many aspects. Following the earthquake, 270,000 cards were issued and distributed to those in need through the collaboration of the Kızılay and AFAD. The cards cater to a wide audience, including Turkish citizens and individuals with foreign identification numbers, making the aid more inclusive. Speed of delivery and the short end to end process duration was extremely important on that occurance. Thanks to experience and collaboration capabilities VakıfBank has managed the whole process with the collaborators. This still shows the great importance and success of this project.