The bank has worked with G4S since 2019 to provide security services including security professionals for a number of ICBC branches. When G4S in Turkey adopted the G4S Academy in-country, the team saw the opportunity to improve the service provision and provide world- leading expertise to this key customer.

Working hand in hand with the G4S Academy and its international network, the team developed a number of bespoke products they believed would deliver significant insight and value for the ICBC.

Legislative compliance

In June 2004 a law was introduced in Turkey called ‘5188’ to ensure that companies offering security services were legitimate. The legislation allows for government officials to visit sites and assess the security provision. If services do not meet specific standards, companies can face significant fines.

Working with G4S Academy experts, G4S designs a thorough annual audit to measure all 38 ICBC branches against the ‘5188’ standards. Across the sites, G4S provides security for 50 percent of them, however the remainder are manned by in-house staff. This audit ensures that those in-house teams, as well as G4S staff, are meeting this legal requirement.

Based on this audit, G4S conducts a risk-based analysis to see how systems can be improved. The report covered physical security measures and technology systems in place such as access control and monitoring technologies.

Once a year, all ICBC employees will be provided with private security training consisting of physical security awareness, regulatory legislation and course of action by G4S Turkey expert trainers. This entails training around 800 employees from all the branches including ICBC’s in- house security teams.

Surprise security drills

Twice a year G4S Turkey carries out an in-depth 60 question audit across every branch. This examines the integrated security services that make up each branch's security detail, such as the number of security professionals and their shift patterns compared with the footfall of customers. This data is processed using G4S Turkey’s own risk analysis system ‘Kokpit’, which holds vast amounts of information and can use this data to identify deficiencies in security systems and predict future security requirements.

Once a year, every branch gets a surprise security drill visit by a specialist team from G4S. This can range from a bag being left in a branch to a staged robbery. The test is to see how security staff react and handle the situation. Only the branch manager is informed confidentially beforehand to ensure staff react as they would in a real crisis. The results of these drills are fed into ‘Kokpit’ to highlight areas of strength and places that need development. With the data the team is able to provide to ICBC via ‘Kokpit’, they can assess the risks in one place, spanning all branches in Turkey’s four regions - an agile security provision that no other company can match.

Bülent Ak, Operations Director for G4S in Turkey says: “This is a really innovative system for us and one that delivers significant value to the customer. Our aim is to start with ICBC and if it proves to be as useful as we believe it will be and beneficial for the customer, we can start rolling it out to our other key customers.”