Turkish Banking Law Explained: The Statutes and the Four Regulators

Banking in Türkiye is governed principally by Banking Law No. 5411 (Bankacılık Kanunu), adopted on 19 October 2005 and published in the Official Gazette of 1 November 2005, No. 25983 (repeated issue). Supervision, however, is not unified: it is shared between four bodies — the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BDDK) for banks and non-bank financing companies, the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye (TCMB) for payment and electronic money institutions, the Capital Markets Board (SPK) for capital markets and, since 2 July 2024, crypto-asset service providers, and MASAK for anti-money-laundering compliance across all of them. Four further statutes decide which of those bodies a given business answers to: Law No. 6493 (payments, e-money and settlement systems), Law No. 6361 (leasing, factoring, financing and savings finance companies), Capital Markets Law No. 6362, and Law No. 5549 (prevention of laundering of proceeds of crime). The single most consequential feature of the system is that these regimes are divided by activity, not by label — and that since 1 January 2020 payment companies are not supervised by the BDDK at all.

Banking Law No. 5411: what it governs and who it binds

Article 1 sets the purpose of the Law as regulating the procedures and principles relating to confidence and stability in financial markets, the effective functioning of the credit system, and the protection of the rights and interests of savers. Those three objectives explain almost every restriction that follows.

Article 2 fixes the perimeter. The Law binds deposit banks, participation banks, and development and investment banks established in Türkiye; the Turkish branches of such institutions established abroad; financial holding companies; the Banks Association of Türkiye and the Participation Banks Association of Türkiye; the BDDK itself; and the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF). A foreign bank with no Turkish establishment is outside it — until it opens a branch, at which point the branch is inside.

Article 4 lists what a bank may actually do, and the list is deliberately broad: deposit-taking, acceptance of participation funds, cash and non-cash lending, payment and fund-transfer operations, custody services, issuance of payment instruments including credit cards, bank cards and travellers’ cheques, foreign-exchange operations, derivatives, dealing in and underwriting capital-markets instruments, guarantee business, investment advice, portfolio management, and factoring and forfaiting. A banking licence is therefore a wide licence — which is precisely why entry into it is controlled so tightly.

Entry runs through two separate gates. Under Article 6, permission to establish a bank in Türkiye, or to open the first Turkish branch of a bank established abroad, requires a decision taken with the affirmative votes of at least five members of the Banking Regulation and Supervision Board. The decision must be notified within three months of the application or of the completion of missing documents, and the application lapses if deficiencies are not remedied within six months. A bank established abroad may alternatively open a representative office with the Board’s permission, provided it does not take deposits or participation funds. But establishment permission alone permits nothing: under Article 10 a separate operating licence (faaliyet izni) must be obtained, and licences granted are published in the Official Gazette. Since a sentence added by Law No. 7420 in 2022, the Board may grant an operating licence subject to limitations or restrictions by category of the Article 4 activities — so a licence is no longer necessarily an all-or-nothing instrument.

Article 7 sets the conditions for a Turkish bank. It must be a joint-stock company (anonim şirket); its shares must be issued against cash and be registered shares; founders and board members must satisfy the statutory conditions; the ownership structure must be transparent enough not to impede effective supervision by the Agency; and a three-year business plan covering internal control, risk management and internal audit systems must be submitted. Those are the same corporate-law foundations any investor meets when incorporating a Turkish company, applied at a much higher intensity.

On minimum capital, read the statute carefully. Article 7(1)(f) still literally requires paid-in capital, in cash and free of any collusion, of not less than thirty million (Yeni) Türk Lirası, with development and investment banks permitted two-thirds of that figure under Article 7(2). That is the unamended 2005 wording, and Law No. 5411 contains no revaluation clause for it. It should be read as a statutory floor that has never been updated — not as an indication of what a licensing application will be expected to demonstrate today.

The BDDK is created by the Law it applies. Article 82 establishes it as a public legal entity with administrative and financial autonomy, headquartered in Istanbul since Law No. 6111 moved it there with effect from 25 February 2011. It exercises its powers independently and under its own responsibility; its decisions are not subject to expediency review (yerindelik denetimi); and no organ, authority or person may issue orders or instructions to influence them. Article 83 makes the seven-member Board its decision-making organ, one member serving as chairman and one as second chairman, with the Board chairman also chairing the Agency. Article 93 sets out the powers: to regulate, implement, monitor and supervise establishment, activities, management, organisational structure, mergers, demergers, share exchanges and liquidation of banks, financial holding companies and other supervised institutions, and to cooperate with foreign counterpart authorities and international financial bodies.

Two footnotes to Law No. 5411 matter in practice. Card business has its own statute — Law No. 5464 on Bank Cards and Credit Cards, published in the Official Gazette of 1 March 2006, No. 26095, whose Article 2 subjects card-system operators, card issuers, merchant-acquiring institutions, member merchants and cardholders alike to its rules. And Provisional Article 32 of Law No. 5411 — the financial restructuring framework under which debtors of banks and of leasing, factoring and financing companies may restructure credits under Framework Agreements prepared in accordance with a regulation issued by the BDDK — had its period of application extended by a further two years from 28 December 2025 by Presidential Decision No. 10765 of 24 December 2025.

Deposit insurance and resolution: where the TMSF fits

The Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (Tasarruf Mevduatı Sigorta Fonu, TMSF) is established by Article 111 of Law No. 5411 as a separate public legal entity with administrative and financial autonomy, headquartered in Istanbul. It insures deposits and participation funds, and it manages, restructures, transfers, merges, sells and liquidates banks transferred to the Fund. Like the BDDK, it is independent in carrying out those duties and its decisions are not subject to expediency review. It was separated from the BDDK and given autonomous status by Law No. 5020 in 2003, and the BDDK’s own institutional history page records that sequence — the Agency itself was created by Banks Law No. 4389 in 1999 and began operations on 31 August 2000, before Law No. 5411 replaced the earlier framework on 1 November 2005.

Article 63 does the insuring. All deposits and participation funds held with credit institutions are insured, except those belonging to official institutions, credit institutions and financial institutions. The scope and the amount are determined by the Fund Board after obtaining the favourable opinion of the Ministry of Treasury and Finance, the Central Bank and the Banking Regulation and Supervision Board, and the risk-based insurance premium may not exceed twenty per mille of insured deposits and participation funds per annum.

The amount moves. By Fund Board Decision No. 2025/706 of 4 December 2025, published in the Official Gazette of 13 December 2025, No. 33106, the insured amount was raised to 1,200,000 TL with effect from the beginning of the 2026 calendar year, applying the revaluation rate announced under Tax Procedure Law No. 213. Because the figure is revalued rather than fixed, any document quoting a bare number without a date is unreliable by construction.

Law No. 6493: payments, e-money and settlement systems

Law No. 6493 — the Law on Payment and Securities Settlement Systems, Payment Services and Electronic Money Institutions — was adopted on 20 June 2013 and published in the Official Gazette of 27 June 2013, No. 28690. It is the statute that governs everything most people mean when they say fintech.

Its most important drafting feature is a definition. In Article 3(1)(b), the term Banka means the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye. Every reference in the Law to authorisation, permission or supervision by the Bank therefore means the TCMB, not a commercial bank. That reading is reinforced by the Central Bank’s own constitutive statute: Law No. 1211, published in the Official Gazette of 26 January 1970, No. 13409, whose Article 4 states that the Bank’s primary objective is to achieve price stability and that it determines its monetary policy and instruments directly and by itself — and which, as amended by Article 38 of Law No. 6493 itself, expressly includes among its basic duties the establishment of payment and securities transfer and settlement systems, ensuring their uninterrupted operation and oversight, making the necessary regulations, and determining the methods and instruments, including electronic media, to be used for payments. The Central Bank maintains a dedicated page for Law No. 6493 within its own legislation section.

This was not always the position. Regulatory competence for payment services, payment institutions and electronic money institutions was transferred from the BDDK to the TCMB by Law No. 7192 of 12 November 2019, which rewrote Articles 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, 14, 14/A, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20 to 27, 29 and 37 and Provisional Article 3 of Law No. 6493 with effect from 1 January 2020. The distinction is not a technicality: filing with the wrong authority is filing with no authority.

The architecture of the Law is straightforward once the definition is understood:

• Article 13 lists the payment service providers — banks within the scope of Law No. 5411, electronic money institutions, payment institutions, and Posta ve Telgraf Teşkilatı A.Ş. (PTT) — and Article 13(2) provides that no one other than the Central Bank and those payment service providers may supply payment services.
• Article 14 requires a payment institution to obtain TCMB authorisation before operating; Article 18 does the same for an electronic money institution, and Article 18(1) prohibits electronic money issuance by anyone other than banks under Law No. 5411, PTT A.Ş. and authorised electronic money institutions.
• Article 5 requires a system operator to obtain TCMB permission to operate a payment or securities settlement system, and Article 8 gives the Central Bank oversight (gözetim) powers over such systems.
• Additional Article 1, added by Law No. 7192, establishes the Türkiye Ödeme ve Elektronik Para Kuruluşları Birliği (TÖDEB) as a professional body with the status of a public institution, and requires every payment and electronic money institution to apply for membership within one month of receiving its operating licence.

Do not confuse share capital with own funds. Law No. 6493 itself sets minimum paid-in capital of at least 5 million TL for a system operator (Article 5(2)(b)), at least 1 million TL for a payment institution providing only the Article 12(1)(e) service and at least 2 million TL for other payment institutions (Article 14(2)(ç)), and at least 5 million TL for an electronic money institution (Article 18(3)(ç)). These are statutory minimum share-capital figures — they are not what an institution must actually hold. The binding prudential requirement is the minimum own funds (asgari özkaynak) under Article 33(1) of the Central Bank’s Regulation on Payment Services and Electronic Money Issuance and on Payment Service Providers, published in the Official Gazette of 1 December 2021, No. 31676. That amount is calculated at the end of June and December each year, and the fixed minimum amounts are re-assessed by the Central Bank every January in the light of annual changes in the price indices published by TÜİK.

By a Central Bank Communiqué published in the Official Gazette of 31 January 2026, No. 33154, those minimum own-funds amounts were re-set at 20 million TL for payment institutions carrying out the service in Article 4(1)(e) of that Regulation, 40 million TL for other payment institutions (excluding those providing only the Regulation’s Article 4(1)(g) service), and 105 million TL for electronic money institutions. The Communiqué entered into force on 30 June 2026, superseding the 15 million / 30 million / 80 million TL figures applied under the 2025 update. The gap between the statutory 5 million TL and the prudential 105 million TL for an e-money institution is the clearest illustration of why reading only the Law is not enough.

One recent amendment is worth flagging for anyone building onboarding flows: Law No. 7571 of 24 December 2025 amended Article 12 of Law No. 6493 with effect from 25 December 2025, adding the words by biometric methods or by identity documents having electronic identity-verification capability to the provision on verification of customer identity. Biometric onboarding also engages Türkiye’s data-protection regime, which runs on its own track — see our guide to KVKK compliance for foreign companies.

Law No. 6361: leasing, factoring, financing and savings finance

Law No. 6361 was adopted on 21 November 2012 and published in the Official Gazette of 13 December 2012, No. 28496. Its official title is now Finansal Kiralama, Faktoring, Finansman ve Tasarruf Finansman Şirketleri Kanunu — the Law on Financial Leasing, Factoring, Financing and Savings Finance Companies. The title of the statute itself was changed by Law No. 7292 with effect from 7 March 2021, which brought savings finance companies into the scope and amended a long list of articles. English references that still call it the Financial Leasing, Factoring and Financing Companies Law describe the pre-2021 statute.

This is a BDDK regime, not a separate one. Article 3 defines Kurul as the Banking Regulation and Supervision Board and Kurum as the BDDK; the professional body for the sector is the Finansal Kurumlar Birliği. As under Law No. 5411, entry runs through two gates: Article 4 requires the Board’s permission to establish such a company in Türkiye, again by the affirmative votes of at least five members, and Article 7 requires a separate operating licence, published in the Official Gazette.

Article 5 sets the establishment conditions. Two of them are worth stating precisely. Under Article 5(1)(e), as amended by Law No. 7292 with effect from 7 March 2021, paid-in capital in cash and free of any collusion must be at least 50 million TL for financial leasing, factoring and financing companies, and at least 100 million TL for savings finance companies. Under Article 5(1)(c) the trade name must contain one of the expressions Finansal Kiralama Şirketi, Faktoring Şirketi, Finansman Şirketi or Tasarruf Finansman Şirketi — the corporate name itself signals the licence.

The BDDK’s supervisory perimeter is accordingly wider than banks alone. Its own institutional page records that, under Laws No. 5411 and No. 6361, it covers financial leasing, factoring, financing, financial holding, savings finance and asset management companies; independent audit, valuation, rating and support-service providers serving banks; and institutions operating under the Bank Cards and Credit Cards Law.

Capital Markets Law No. 6362 — and, since 2024, crypto

Capital Markets Law No. 6362 was adopted on 6 December 2012 and published in the Official Gazette of 30 December 2012, No. 28513. Article 1 states its purpose as regulating and supervising the capital market so that it functions and develops in a reliable, transparent, efficient, stable, fair and competitive environment, and so that investors’ rights and interests are protected.

Article 117 establishes the Capital Markets Board (Sermaye Piyasası Kurulu, SPK) as a public legal entity with administrative and financial autonomy, headquartered in Istanbul, whose decisions are not subject to expediency review and to which no organ, authority or person may give instructions. Article 118 gives it a seven-member decision-making organ, one member serving as chairman and one as second chairman; under Article 119(2) the chairman, second chairman, deputy chairman and members are appointed by the President. Article 128 sets out its duties and powers, which include taking general and specific decisions to ensure timely, adequate and accurate public disclosure, determining the conditions and working principles for independent audit, rating, valuation and information-systems audit activity, cooperating and exchanging information with other financial regulatory and supervisory authorities for financial stability, and concluding bilateral or multilateral memoranda of understanding with counterpart foreign regulators on the basis of reciprocity and protection of professional secrecy.

The structural change of the last two years happened here. Law No. 7518, adopted 26 June 2024 and published in the Official Gazette of 2 July 2024, No. 32590, brought crypto-asset service providers inside the Capital Markets Law. It amended Articles 3, 13, 46, 74, 99, 101, 103 and 130 and inserted new Articles 35/B, 35/C, 99/A, 99/B, 109/A, 110/A, 110/B, 115/A and Provisional Article 11, all with effect from the date of publication.

Article 3 now carries statutory definitions of kripto varlık (crypto asset), kripto varlık hizmet sağlayıcı (crypto-asset service provider), platform, cüzdan (wallet) and kripto varlık saklama hizmeti (crypto-asset custody service). A crypto asset is defined as an intangible asset created and stored electronically using distributed ledger technology or similar technology, distributed over digital networks, and capable of expressing value or a right.

Article 35/B is the operative provision. Crypto-asset service providers may not be established or begin operations without the SPK’s permission; they may carry out only the activities the Board determines; and share transfers require Board approval — transfers made in breach are not recorded in the share ledger, and any entry made in breach is void. The Board determines the rules on their establishment, shareholders, managers, personnel, organisation, capital and capital adequacy, obligations, information systems, permitted activities, and temporary or permanent suspension of activities. The SPK’s own announcement of 2 July 2024 states that the regime covers the purchase and sale, clearing and transfer of crypto assets and the custody those activities require, together with the storage and management of the private keys that confer the right to transfer from a wallet. The detailed rules arrived in two communiqués published in the Official Gazette of 13 March 2025, No. 32840: Communiqué III-35/B.1 on establishment and operating principles, and Communiqué III-35/B.2 on working procedures and principles and capital adequacy.

Law No. 5549: MASAK and the anti-money-laundering layer

Law No. 5549 on the Prevention of Laundering Proceeds of Crime was adopted on 11 October 2006 and published in the Official Gazette of 18 October 2006, No. 26323. Article 1 states its purpose as determining the procedures and principles for preventing the laundering of proceeds of crime.

MASAK is not a regulator on the same footing as the other three. Article 2 defines Başkanlık as the Financial Crimes Investigation Board Presidency (Malî Suçları Araştırma Kurulu Başkanlığı), which sits within the Ministry of Treasury and Finance; Article 19, which had set out its duties and powers, was repealed by Decree-Law No. 703 of 2 July 2018, so those duties are no longer defined in Law No. 5549 itself. It is nonetheless the layer that touches every institution described above.

Article 2 also defines the obliged parties (yükümlü), and the list is long: those operating in banking, insurance, individual pension, capital markets, money lending and other financial services; postal and transport services; games of chance and betting; those dealing in, or intermediating in dealings in, foreign exchange, immovables, precious stones and metals, jewellery, means of transport, construction machinery, historical artefacts, works of art and antiques; notaries; sports clubs; and — within defined limits — self-employed lawyers. A separate defined term, finansal grup, added by Law No. 7262 with effect from 31 December 2020, captures Turkish-resident financial institutions belonging to or controlled by a parent whose head office is in Türkiye or abroad, together with their branches, agencies, representatives, commercial proxies and similar affiliated units.

The position of lawyers changed twice in 2024 and should not be summarised loosely. The Constitutional Court, by decision of 18 January 2024 (E:2021/28, K:2024/11), annulled the wording that Law No. 7262 had inserted into Article 2 making self-employed lawyers obliged parties, with effect from 3 April 2024. Law No. 7521 of 18 July 2024 then re-amended Articles 2 and 13, with effect from 26 July 2024, re-inserting lawyers in a narrowed form — excluding information obtained during professional activities under Article 35(1) and (3) of Attorneys Act No. 1136 and within alternative dispute resolution, expressly subject to the rights of defence and the right to be heard, and limited to work only lawyers may perform, with Article 36 of Law No. 1136 reserved.

Two further provisions have direct operational consequences. Article 19/A empowers the Minister — with power to delegate to a deputy minister — to suspend for seven working days, or to refuse to allow, transactions attempted or in progress with or through obliged parties where there is suspicion that the assets are connected with a laundering or terrorist-financing offence, so that MASAK can confirm the suspicion, analyse the transaction and refer the results to the competent authorities. And Article 28 provides that the fixed monetary amounts in Articles 13 and 16 are increased at the beginning of each year by the revaluation rate determined under Tax Procedure Law No. 213 for the preceding year — which is why any penalty figure quoted from the bare statutory text is out of date the moment it is written.

Who supervises what: the bodies compared

Body	What it supervises	Governing law
BDDK (Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency)	Deposit, participation and development-and-investment banks; Turkish branches of foreign banks; financial holding companies; leasing, factoring, financing, savings finance and asset management companies; audit, valuation, rating and support-service providers serving banks	Law No. 5411; Law No. 6361
TCMB (Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye)	Payment institutions, electronic money institutions, payment and securities settlement system operators; monetary policy, banknote issue, lender of last resort	Law No. 1211; Law No. 6493 (competence from 1 Jan 2020)
SPK (Capital Markets Board)	The capital market, public disclosure, independent audit / rating / valuation activity; crypto-asset service providers since 2 July 2024	Law No. 6362
MASAK (Financial Crimes Investigation Board Presidency)	Anti-money-laundering and terrorist-financing compliance by obliged parties across every regime above; within the Ministry of Treasury and Finance	Law No. 5549
TMSF (Savings Deposit Insurance Fund)	Not a licensing regulator: insures deposits and participation funds, and manages, restructures, transfers, merges, sells and liquidates banks transferred to the Fund	Law No. 5411, arts. 63 and 111

Note what the table does not show: no single authority sees the whole picture. The BDDK, the SPK and the TMSF are each constituted as autonomous public legal entities headquartered in Istanbul whose decisions are outside expediency review; the TCMB operates under its own 1970 statute; MASAK is an administrative unit of a ministry. They interlock but they do not merge.

What this means for a foreign bank or fintech entering the market

Four practical consequences follow from the structure above.

First, the regulator is chosen by the activity. A single consumer-facing product — a wallet that stores value, moves money, and offers a credit feature — can engage the TCMB for the payment and e-money elements and the BDDK for anything that amounts to lending. The correct sequence is to decompose the product into the statutory activities in Article 4 of Law No. 5411, Articles 12 and 13 of Law No. 6493 and the Article 3 definitions of Law No. 6362 before deciding on a structure at all.

Second, entry is two-stage and the second stage is public. Both Law No. 5411 and Law No. 6361 separate the permission to establish from the operating licence, and both publish the licence in the Official Gazette. Under Article 10 of Law No. 5411 the Board may now grant a banking operating licence subject to limitations or restrictions by category of activity, which means the scope of what is granted is itself a negotiable and reviewable object, not a formality.

Third, the corporate form is prescribed. A Turkish bank must be an anonim şirket with registered shares issued against cash and an ownership structure transparent enough not to impede supervision. That constrains the holding structure a foreign group can use, and it interacts with the choice between a branch, a subsidiary and a representative office — the general version of that decision is set out in our guide to entering Türkiye as a liaison office, branch or subsidiary, and for a bank the representative-office route under Article 6 is expressly conditioned on not taking deposits or participation funds.

Fourth, the numbers that bind are not the numbers in the statutes. The bank capital figure in Article 7(1)(f) of Law No. 5411 has not been touched since 2005; the payment-institution figures in Law No. 6493 are floors sitting far below the prudential own-funds requirement re-set each January by the Central Bank. Tax works the same way and belongs in the same model: financial institutions face a higher corporate income tax rate than ordinary companies, which is set out in our guide to how foreign companies are taxed in Türkiye.

The framework is stable in its architecture and unstable in its figures. The statutes — 5411, 6493, 6361, 6362, 5549 — have held their shape for years, while the amounts inside them move every January and the perimeter occasionally jumps, as it did for crypto in July 2024 and for payments in January 2020. Two things are therefore worth checking in any account of this area before it is relied on: whether the right regulator is named for the activity in question, and whether every figure quoted carries a date. Our banking and finance practice works alongside our foreign investment practice on exactly that mapping exercise — which statute, which authority, which current figure.