This started in September 2008 when Deutsche bank acquired 30% of Postbank for 2.8 billion euro. Postbank a bank who’s roots in the country’s postal system. But in 2008 was an year of financial crises due to which Deutsche bank struggled to complete it’s integration. Deutsche bank initiated a program named ‘Unity’ which aim was to migrate all the customers of post bank on Deutsche bank platform.
Postbank Migration
On Monday 3rd July 2023, Germany’s largest bank said that Bank have completed technology integration process with Postbank under fourth and final phase of migration. Bank also said that they will save a lost of cost in 2023 and 2024 from 2025 it will save around 300 million euros.
This migration happened on last weekend (1st and 2nd July) due to which some of the customers said that they do not have access to all the system post migration. Deutsche bank completed migration of around 19 million customers on a common platform. This migration happened in total 4 waves, in last 3 waves around 12 million customers got migrated. In the last 4th wave remaining customers got migrated.
Migration Impact
As per update online and mobile banking was not possible from Friday 30th June 5p.m to Monday 3rd July 2 PM. Also any banking transaction by telephone was impacted between Friday 5p.m to 3rd July Monday 9AM . between these period of time self service devices was also impacted.
Migration Count
In 4th wave , around four million contracts of two million customers will be migrated. This 4 million contracts includes customer from consumer loans , mortgage lending, current account, call money and time deposits. The new platform will replace the Postbank financial assistant.
After the completion of “Unity” project, around twelve million customers of Postbank have been migrated with seven million customer of Deutsche bank in Germany on a one platform. Deutsche Bank said “With the successful completion of the migration, all of the more than 19 million customers of the retail bank and the corporate bank in Germany are now on a common IT platform.
Customer complaints
As this migration are not easy , In every wave of migration Postbank customers need to face issue while using Banking services for for this Post bank have already informed it’s all the customers and provided support for every customer who faced issue. However there are no. of complaints which are getting piled up in queue and it was expected.
Failure in Migration
Sometimes in banking system migrating large amount of customer accounts to a new platform can be risky. we have seen an example in 2018 when Sabadell Bank migrated million of TSB Bank customer accounts from LIoyds Bank – which had hosted since TSB was separated from LIoyds – on a new Banking platform ,was a big failure.
Which result in lock for 5 days for all the customers , where customer faced a lot of issues like – money disappearing from their accounts , some customers were able to see others account. Due to which bank faced fine of 48.65m euro from UK finance regulators for the failure of migration and issues faced by customers.
Next Action
Next Action would be to decommission of the Postbank hardware and software which will contribute in saving cost to the bank. The Bank will shutdown the Postbank IT system. In 2020 when the decision was taken to move on a common platform , then Bank have sold Postbank IT operation to the supplier TCS, and this deal was done with token amount of 1 euro only. The name of the IT unit was Postbank Systems which was focusing mainly on retail banking.
This is the big achievement for Deutsche Bank where they will a lot of benefits ,
- Deutsche Bank got a huge customer base.
- Deutsche Bank will save 300 million euro every year from 2025.