TOM Bank Scales Securely with F5 Hybrid Environment
TOM Bank, Turkey’s largest digital bank, partnered with F5 and NETSYS to implement a sophisticated hybrid on-premises and cloud architecture. This helped the bank onboard millions of customers in its first year and achieve continuous availability, cost efficiencies, and compliance with strict data and security regulations.
Business challenge
TOM Bank, a part of the TOM Group, is on a mission to transform banking in Turkey. With a focus on technological innovation and customer experience, it is the country’s largest licensed digital bank, attracting approximately 2 million account holders in its first year of operation. Look closer and it’s easy to see why. The bank’s eye-catching app offers a compelling range of financial services including QR code payments, instant money transfers, and Shariah compliant savings, making it highly popular with Turkey’s digitally savvy population.
The bank is also well known for its ethical approach to finance, targeting communities traditionally underserved by financial services. In addition to TOM Bank’s account holders, over 10 million people use its app as a digital wallet to preload funds and make payments to individuals or businesses, fostering greater financial inclusion.
Although Turkey has a reputation for digital innovation, the bank must navigate an increasingly regulated landscape, balancing innovation with data protection, cybersecurity, and customer consent rules. In this environment, the choice of technology platform plays an important role in delivering seamless digital experiences while upholding the availability, security, and compliance required in a tightly governed banking sector.
For a fast-scaling digital business with an eye on infrastructure costs, cloud-native architectures are ideal. They also support modern application architectures, including microservices managed by orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes. At the same time, on-premises infrastructures play an important role when it comes to regulation, ensuring data sovereignty, and maintaining low-latency access to critical systems. Getting the best of both worlds was the foundation of TOM Bank’s IT strategy.
Solution
The bank’s parent organization, TOM Group, put F5 technology at the heart of its architecture when the bank launched. Specifically, the F5 technology includes F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF, which help manage and protect an earlier e-payments service and a financing solution.
So, when the time came to launch a pure-play digital bank that ran on a hybrid architecture, TOM Group turned again to F5. Murat Kökdemir, Tom Bank’s Chief System and Security Officer (CSSO and CISO), says, “F5 has long been a trusted technology partner for our on-premises infrastructure. When we launched TOM Bank, we looked to take advantage of the F5’s cloud expertise, especially F5 Distributed Cloud Services.”
The bank turned to NETSYS, a global service provider specializing in network and security solutions and an F5 Unity+ Gold Partner. "We first met NETSYS at a shared data center where they supported another client,” says Kökdemir. “We happened to mention a configuration issue we were dealing with, and their consultants jumped in and resolved it on the spot—without charging us. That left a big impression.”
In the initial phase of the TOM Bank project, NETSYS undertook a detailed analysis to assess the current state of services in terms of redundancy and traffic management. Based on these insights, an architecture incorporating both F5 BIG-IP DNS and F5 Distributed Cloud Services was designed and implemented, taking into account the topology of existing data centers, service traffic patterns, and critical service dependencies to enhance scalability and resilience.
This infrastructure enables service redundancy across multiple data centers and establishes traffic routing mechanisms based on real-time service health status and geographic traffic management functions. Smart routing helps ensure user requests are directed to the healthiest and most suitable data center while continuously monitoring service health.
“With F5, I can direct anything from 5% to 95% of traffic to a specific location. That flexibility and control over multiple data centers is critical for the business,” says Kökdemir.
F5 Distributed Cloud DNS helps TOM Bank ensure redundancy for external services. If there is a service outage at one location, a failover mechanism automatically redirects traffic to an active data center. In addition, the bank activated the DDoS protection feature of F5 Distributed Cloud DNS to protect against external threats.
This highly automated architecture restricts the need for manual intervention, reducing operational workloads, and frees IT resources to focus on other projects. “With F5 Distributed Cloud Services, we now have a highly resilient array of networked data centers that is monitored continuously and where traffic can be recalibrated based on external factors from customer demand to cyberattacks,” says Kökdemir.
Results
Scaling fast with F5
With F5, TOM Bank gets the most from its hybrid cloud and on-premises setup. It can scale rapidly to meet surges in customer demand, while maintaining strict data sovereignty requirements.
If laws shift, the Bank can transition data and workloads to the cloud within weeks, no re-architecture required. This agility is critical in the Turkish financial sector where compliance rules continue to evolve.
Enhancing the customer experience
"Without a physical bank network, TOM Bank must create an experience that feels personal and reliable so that our customers know we are always here for them,” says Kökdemir.
To ensure continuous availability and meet customer expectations, TOM Bank uses a distributed infrastructure strategy supported by F5. By decoupling systems across multiple regions, the bank enhances resilience and enables geographic failover with dynamic traffic routing—so services remain online and responsive, even during localized disruptions.
A trusted partnership
Navigating complex technologies requires expert collaboration. TOM Bank’s partnership with NETSYS is central to the successful deployment of F5 solutions. “From the initial planning stages through to full implementation, we collaborated closely with NETSYS. Their expertise was instrumental in guiding us to the right solutions and configurations,” says Kökdemir. “Throughout every phase, NETSYS provided unwavering support. I can confidently say they are our most trusted partner for F5 solutions.”
Cutting costs by 30%
Transitioning to a hybrid infrastructure with F5 has helped enable TOM Bank and its parent organization TOM Group to significantly reduce operational expenses. By phasing out legacy on-premises systems and adopting more efficient F5-based solutions, the bank successfully lowered total infrastructure costs by 30%.
F5 and NETSYS also managed the deployment sensibly and within budget. The result: modernized systems with better value, reduced maintenance needs, and improved resource allocation across the bank’s IT environment.
Robust protection with F5
F5 BIG-IP products and Distributed Cloud Services don’t just manage traffic, they actively defend against threats. TOM Bank relies on the DDoS protection feature of Distributed Cloud DNS to safeguard its digital platform. Even during minor DDoS incidents originating from abroad, the bank’s team swiftly mitigates attacks, helping to ensure service continuity. This robust security posture is crucial for a financial institution that must uphold customer trust while facing constant cyberthreats.
- Scale rapidly with a hybrid cloud infrastructure
- Maintain data sovereignty and security
- Reduce infrastructure costs by 30%
- Ensure robust threat protection
- Onboard millions of new customers
- Comply with local data regulations
- Better manage operational expenses
- Defend against rising volumes of cyberattacks