Mine Taşkaya has been named one of Turkey’s 50 Most Influential CEOs

Our CEO Mine Taşkaya has been recognized as one of the 50 Most Influential CEOs in Turkey by Business Life magazine.

In a special interview with Business Life regarding this achievement, Taşkaya discussed various topics, including our innovative products with high competitive strength and advanced functionality, the competitive advantage we provide to our customers by leveraging the transformative power of artificial intelligence and analytics, and our R&D investments that support our vision of becoming a leading technology company in the global market, as well as the E-Turquality (Stars of Informatics) program.

What projects are you proud to have implemented in the past year? What successful initiatives do you think contributed to your recognition as one of the 50 Most Influential CEOs in Turkey?

As GTech, we are developing innovative products with high competitive strength and advanced functionality on a global scale, providing our customers with a competitive advantage by leveraging the transformative power of artificial intelligence and analytics. Our investments focused on R&D and the gains our customers achieve with our products are giving us globally competitive capabilities.

Although 2023 has been a challenging year for all of us, it has also been a year where we crowned our financial performance with strategic moves, thanks to our investments in our products and significant collaborations. As a result, we recorded a growth of 151% in revenue in TL terms and a 169% increase in product revenue, achieving a high EBITDA performance.

Our core banking product, Symphony Banking, which is critical both globally and locally, has continued its leadership with a market share of over 50%, solidifying its rapid growth with the customers we acquired in the past year.

Additionally, being selected as one of the first 25 software companies accepted into the E-Turquality (Stars of Informatics) Program, established by the Ministry of Trade to create regional and global unicorns that can compete in international markets, is another strategic development that reinforces our vision of being a leading global technology company in financial technologies and analytics.

What has been your most significant achievement in growing your company and succeeding in an inflationary environment?

By leveraging government incentives to increase our R&D investments and developing competitive products that drive customer acquisition, we moved from 198th to 155th place in the ranking of Turkey’s top 500 IT companies in 2023, becoming the 9th company in the technology sector with the highest R&D investments.

Companies can only achieve success through their employees. To attract talented professionals to GTech and work together for many years, as well as to strengthen inter-team connections and enhance company loyalty, we offer all our employees the opportunity to participate in GTech’s future through stock options. We frequently organize social activities and provide innovative training for development opportunities. As a result, we improved our employee turnover rate by 39% compared to the previous year in 2023.

What are your main focuses and goals for 2024? Where do you currently stand in relation to these goals? What are your top three priorities?

To support our vision of becoming a leading technology company in the global market, we are prioritizing our R&D investments this year. Our goal is to increase the share of product revenue in our total turnover, thereby creating opportunities for our competitive products to support our international expansion.

In the last two years, we opened offices in Dubai and Baku, and this year we plan to establish another office in East Africa. In line with this, we have formed partnership channels in these regions as well as in Eastern Europe, and we are at the project evaluation stage with many clients. We anticipate that by the end of the year, we will enhance our presence in these markets through numerous successful projects.

We are developing projects related to sustainability and the green deal in collaboration with TÜBİTAK and the European Union cluster EUROGIA. Our aim is to enable sustainability in information technologies and ensure sustainability throughout the product life cycle in the industry, leaving a more livable world for future generations. To achieve these goals, we are implementing projects through our Sustainability Desk at our R&D Center.

This interview was originally published in the September 2024 issue of Business Life.