Starting from the early 2000’s, North Cyprus has become popular for visitors in terms of living, especially for UK nationals. Naturally among the reasons were weather, geographic location, lower living costs and cheaper property prices. But, above all, was the hospitality of North Cypriots. These factors have ensured a continual inflow and the Expat population has now reached 10,000.
In order to meet the service challenges of the ex-pat community, those enterprising professional businesses in North Cyprus realised they had to adapt their services in order to meet the expectations of this rapidly developing sector.
As Creditwest Bank, we conducted surveys to help us restructure our business in order to meet this demand. This resulted in the creation of an Expat banking unit in 2007. Since then we have placed emphasis in providing the highest level of service to ex-pats.
The concept behind this theme is to ensure that our services to expats are provided by staff who have a knowledge, not simply of their language, but also their culture. This enables us to explain our products more effectively and to readily understand the needs of our customers so that we can develop our services further.
When we embarked on the idea of Expat Banking we had a vision that long term excellence was more important than short term gains. Our belief is that excellence of service will result in long term success. This has been the cornerstone of our ethos.
The performance of the bank, and its “AA+” rating, is not a coincidence. It has been achieved by recruiting the right staff, providing an excellent training programme, and creating an environment that provides a motivation and passion for their work. This ensures a dedicated team, all of whom are supported by a committed head office. This relationship and our emphasis on ‘face to face’ banking enables our front line staff to make recommendations to management on how our services can be improved.
In this world of shrinking economies, fixed income returns are in high demand and a key requirement for our customers. We may not be the “highest interest paying” bank but we provide a more than satisfactory level of income on our savings accounts. We also acknowledge that savings and investments go ‘hand in hand’ so we design our products not just to increase your Fixed income but also to protect savings against volatility of financial markets.
Two of our products that have a wide appeal for our customers, are our standing order service and our money transfer facility. Since most of our clients reside in North Cyprus they need the comfort factor of knowing that regular payments for utility bills can be made automatically by standing order. The money transfer service enables SWIFT and Moneygram transfers to a wide range of countries in the world.
To conclude, we believe that our experience in this sector has surged dramatically during the last years, which in turn helps us fulfil the needs of Expats to a great degree. As Creditwest Bank it is our vision to continue fulfiling the needs of Expats to the fullest by providing them with convenient and state of the art banking services.