Koalay was founded in 2014 by its majority shareholder BHL Holdings and became Turkey's first and leading digital platform that offers 100% online and real-time end-to-end insurance intermediary services.
Koalay.com has a system that can very quickly scan and compare the automobile and traffic insurance policies offered by insurance companies, including the policy costs and scopes. Koalay.com searches for the right offers for its customers' budget and needs on behalf of them and thus helps them to save time and buy their policies with ease.
Koalay merged with Hesapkurdu, another successful actor in the banking side of the fintech ecosystem, in the last year. BHL continues to be the major shareholder in the new company formed through this merger that moves forward with stronger staff, management, investors, and products.
Koalay's Chairman of the Board and CTO Şahin Utar pointed out that he joined Koalay in 2016 as CTO and said, “Concurrently with my coming aboard, our systems started to require more resources. Through our integrations with more than 20 companies and the improvements we made to our platform enable our customers and business partners to give end-to-end insurance offers, turn these offers into policies and satisfy their customers by letting them have their policies within minutes. The number of offers we give and the policies we create online has increased by hundreds of times in the last 4.5 years. We work with Eclit because they can respond to our resource needs on this scale with high performance."
Şahin Utar marked that Kolay has been working with Eclit since the very first day and shared his opinions on the matter as follows: "The reason why Eclit was chosen for the provision of infrastructure and hosting services is solely related with Eclit's references, capabilities and its approach towards its customers. When our founding team of expats came to visit from South Africa, they met with Eclit's founders and engineers. Together, they designed and deployed both the company's system on the cloud and the redundant systems located in our system room at the office. Eclit transferred our B2B and B2C systems onto its cloud, while the systems that we wanted to run from the office location, such as the call center infrastructure, are hosted in our office. This is what makes us; the way we create value, our integrations and platforms. We need a corporate infrastructure architecture that is redundant and load-balanced to ensure our integrations and platforms run smoothly."
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Şahin Utar underlined that the level of service Koalay provides to its customers can only be possible through a strong infrastructure and said, "Scalability and provision of a dynamic source location is one of our basic requirements. To be able to do this is a part of the level of service we offer to our customers. The application servers of our B2C and B2B2C platforms, API servers and databases are all hosted with Eclit. Security, redundancy, network management and architecture of these are also managed by Eclit under the "managed systems" concept. We also procure other services from Eclit, including the management of the local systems of Koalay and Hesapkurdu, and help desk services.
Utar also mentioned that Eclit provides them onsite support services and said, "The person who gave us onsite support for Eclit is a member of our IT team. We never parted ways since this colleague of ours is already the longest-serving and most experienced member of our IT team that is comprised of 35-40 people. How Eclit chooses its team members also indicates the importance they place on quality and a high level of service. Eclit's work ethic is one of the qualities that we value most in them. Accountability, transparency, rationality, and being customer-focused are rare qualities to find. To be able to get a detailed and satisfying retrospective analysis after an issue occurs is one of the most important benefits of working with an infrastructure provider and we see that Eclit performs this step as an established practice".
Şahin Utar further explained their cooperation by these words: "When the need arises, we meet with Eclit and we work and make plans together as if the Eclit team is a part of our own infrastructure team.” Utar then concluded as follows: “At Koalay and Hesapkurdu, we do not have an IT operation outside DevOps. The fact that Eclit offers us managed resources that are unique to our needs keeps it one step ahead of its competitors. We are living in the age of specialization and efficiency. We concentrate on creating technologies and value in the finance sector by developing software. I believe it is a huge advantage that we don't have to create a team for managing our infrastructure because it is not the area that we directly focus to create value."
