You are Elif Aydın, Brand Manager at Demir Bank in Istanbul. The bank has six weeks to launch an artificial-intelligence assistant inside its app, and a customer test has just shown that trust in the brand falls when people learn they are talking to a program. Before this week is out, your team has to commit to one explanation of why.
The situation
It is 9 June 2026. Demir Bank serves 4.2 million retail customers, and 71% of its contact with them already runs through the app. For ten years it has published the highest brand trust index in its peer group: 74 out of 100, against a sector median of 61. It built that on a promise painted on every branch window: service is "İnsan gibi", human-like.
The Chief Operating Officer wants Demir Asistan live before the third-quarter earnings call. Finance reckons that if it resolves 55% of contacts on its own, the bank saves TRY 308 million a year; every ten points short is worth about TRY 56 million less. The build budget is fixed at TRY 4.0 million.
The customer-panel test tried the simplest design: no notice that it was a program, no confidentiality message, access to all the data. The index fell nine points, from 74 to 65. Among the 38% of customers most concerned about privacy, who hold 56% of the deposits, the fall was roughly double. On top of that, Turkey's data-protection law requires explicit consent before sensitive data is processed, and a journalist has already asked for information about the launch.