A customer loses a wallet, goes to the bank and asks for help cancelling the cards. The bank would be delighted to help. First, could the customer supply the card numbers? It is a small masterpiece of institutional logic: the information required to solve the problem has disappeared inside the problem itself.
Özkan Erener used a version of this predicament to explain what goes wrong when banking software makes employees work around the bank’s systems. His example was illustrative, but the underlying complaint was precise. At one bank VeriPark worked with, cancelling cards meant opening three applications, moving through eleven screens and printing four forms. A missing wallet had acquired a considerable administrative entourage.
Erener, VeriPark’s co-founder and CEO, has spent much of his career on the machinery behind such encounters. His business supplies the software through which financial institutions meet their customers, whether on a phone, at a branch or through a service representative. His recurring question is disarmingly ordinary: can the bank put what it knows to useful work when someone needs it?
A company, because somebody needed an invoice
Erener studied at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, attending from 1988 to 1992; his engineering background was in electronics. He and Özgür Yoğurtçu went on to establish VeriPark in 1998. The beginning had a practical urgency that makes a welcome change from the ceremonial founding myth.
Aslı Derbent Özkan, who joined the company and became a central figure in its leadership, later described the founders working freelance from home. The opportunity was Pamukbank’s internet branch, with the young business working as a subcontractor to Microsoft Consulting Services. There was work to deliver and Microsoft needed an invoice. Incorporation supplied the necessary stationery.
That origin matters because a functioning banking service was there at the beginning. VeriPark’s early problem was concrete: help turn the internet into a place where a bank’s customers could actually transact. A website could be a shop window. An internet branch had to do something once the customer arrived.
The distinction would follow Erener through changing technologies. Internet banking, branch software, customer records and AI all invite elaborate presentations. The customer generally arrives with a less elaborate ambition: finish the task.
The customer on the other side of the fair
In Erener’s account, the international business acquired its first customer at a trade fair in Bahrain in 2007. The customer was a bank in Dubai. VeriPark’s teams in Turkey began delivering the project, and the company’s overseas journey took shape around an actual assignment.
It is an appealingly specific beginning for a business that would operate across several regions. There was a country, an event, a customer and a project. The grand word “globalisation” arrived with a delivery obligation attached.
Erener’s explanation of the opportunity gives Turkey a particular role. He argues that the sophistication of Turkish banking created experience his company could take elsewhere. Projects completed at home became evidence when talking to prospective customers abroad. The domestic market had supplied a demanding education.
By 2011, he was being introduced at an industry conference as general manager of VeriPark Gulf, specialising in bank delivery channels and customer relationship management. His responsibilities included the company’s product roadmap. The engineer was carrying both a commercial brief and the question of what the software should become.
in Turkey
Dubai customer
in Canada
Keeping the workshop close
In 2015, Erener described Turkish software development as the backbone of VeriPark’s international operations. An offshore development centre in Izmir was part of that approach. Expansion did not require abandoning the place where much of the work was done.
He also set an ambitious target that year: roughly doubling overseas revenue. A target belongs in the future tense, and it is useful to keep it there. What it reveals is the scale of his intention at that moment, with international sales becoming an increasingly consequential part of the business.
The arrangement gives his career a useful shape. Building overseas relationships and maintaining development capacity at home were connected activities. A foreign contract still had to become working software, built and supported by people. The signature was the beginning of the obligation.
That helps explain why a CEO’s biography can lead repeatedly back to product decisions. For Erener, a bank’s customer relationship and the systems available to its employees sit inside the same business problem. Selling the promise puts the delivery team on the hook.
Eleven screens for one missing wallet
Return to the card-cancellation example. Erener’s interest lies in the distance between a single human request and the collection of systems required to answer it. He makes a case for a unified front end: one working environment that brings banking functions together.
A screen is an unglamorous thing to care about until you are the employee who must navigate eleven of them. The customer experiences the delay as the bank’s behaviour. The employee experiences it as a sequence of chores. The software has quietly become the third participant in the conversation.
The card-cancellation process at one bank described in Erener’s 2018 explanation of unified front ends. These figures describe that example, not a banking-industry average.
In a separate discussion of banking interfaces, he pointed to another awkward mismatch: employees accustomed to modern personal devices could arrive at work to use cumbersome older applications. He also criticised selling a product merely because a bank had a target to meet, without accounting for the customer’s recent history.
That observation makes his position more interesting than a preference for tidier screens. The system should help someone decide what is relevant. Offering another credit card to a customer who has just cancelled one is a rather expensive way to demonstrate that nobody was listening.
Taking the bank to the doorstep
One project made the delivery-channel question quite literal. VeriPark and VakıfBank developed an iPad application for the bank’s direct sales team. The point was to let agents conduct banking business where customers lived and worked, carrying the relevant information with them.
In 2019, the application was in use by 2,400 employees and covered about 90 percent of retail banking operations. It combined customer information with account-opening and product-application functions. An offline mode let agents save applications and synchronise them later. Connectivity, evidently, was not entitled to dictate the entire appointment.
Erener described his enthusiasm for exploring a new delivery channel. The project offers a concrete companion to his arguments about service: a person with a tablet could bring more of the bank into a conversation away from its premises.
It also complicates the familiar picture of digital banking as a solitary customer tapping a phone. Here, software equipped another human being to help. That arrangement sits comfortably alongside his later interest in preserving relationships as banking becomes more automated.
Three verbs instead of another dashboard
Erener’s long relationship with Microsoft runs through the company’s origin and its later platform choices. When Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services launched, he described the effort previously spent on industry data models, platform services and interface controls. The engineering foundations could consume energy that might otherwise go into banking problems.
His argument for the platform was therefore practical. Shared banking foundations could reduce the amount each software company had to build before reaching the customer’s actual needs. It was an explanation of where development time goes, from someone accustomed to accounting for it.
“serve, solve and sell”
Özkan Erener, on what a single customer view should enable
Those three verbs carry his test for a customer record. A consolidated view should support action. Looking at information is only part of the job; staff must be able to resolve a request and conduct the next appropriate piece of business.
VeriPark’s recognition in the 2024 IDC FinTech Rankings Top 100 and its 2025-2026 Microsoft AI Business Solutions Inner Circle award mark the scale the company reached. They are company achievements under his leadership. The more revealing question remains the one at the counter: what can the employee do now?
The next argument is about capacity
In his outlook for 2026, Erener argued that rising costs, increasingly difficult fraud problems, compliance demands and customer expectations were putting pressure on banks’ ability to operate. He presented AI as a way to help people handle the volume and complexity of decisions inside a financial institution.
This was a prediction about how banking would develop, and an expression of where he wanted VeriPark to contribute. His emphasis fell on better judgement, faster responses and maintaining relationships as workloads grew. Responsibility still belonged to the institution.
His later public discussion of the “Connected Bank” pursued a related question: how could the attentiveness of an in-person encounter carry across large numbers of digital interactions? He connected digital sales, continuity across channels and AI to that ambition. The language had changed since internet branches; the concern with remembering the customer was recognisable.
In October 2026, his session at the Qorus SME Banking Leadership Council in Dubai extended that thinking to smaller businesses. He discussed banks becoming operating platforms for SMEs, connecting onboarding, merchants’ daily activities and financing. The question had expanded from how a customer reaches a bank to how banking fits into the customer’s working day. It is another way of putting the relationship closer to the activity it is supposed to support.
A long way from Pamukbank, close to the same task
On January 21, 2026, Kootenay Savings Credit Union in British Columbia announced that it had selected VeriPark as its digital banking partner. The plan covered online and mobile services and better support across digital and branch channels, with implementation beginning in 2026 and enhancements introduced in phases.
Erener framed the decision around modernising the member experience while retaining the credit union’s community purpose. The distinction matters for a supplier operating internationally. A platform may travel; the relationship it supports belongs to the institution and its members.
For the person using it, the result will be judged in smaller units than an international footprint: an application completed, a question answered, a conversation continued without starting again. Erener’s career has carried him from a Turkish internet-branch assignment to those everyday encounters in other countries.
The missing wallet remains a useful test. Somebody has a problem. The bank already knows quite a lot. The software ought to help the two facts meet.