Isbank is celebrating its centenary this year. But as chief executive Hakan Aran sits down with Euromoney in his office on the 37th floor, overlooking a cloudy Istanbul, he is keen to talk about the future. He likes to spend his time thinking about transformation; whether green, digital or even the transformation of the bank’s bricks-and-mortar branch network.
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But looming over this, like the clouds that hang over the Bosphorus, is the operating landscape for the bank. Turkey’s economy is still taking baby steps out of a period of volatility and regulatory uncertainty that caused Isbank and other privately-owned banks to shut down long-term lending and move their focus from profits to balance sheet management.
“It was a huge risk management activity for us,” says Aran, describing the last couple of years since the Covid pandemic. “It was a huge effort just to manage the currency risk.”
The regulatory uncertainty was created by previous efforts by the government to tackle inflation without raising interest rates.
