Deutsche Bank completes migration of millions of Postbank customers

Deutsche Bank has completed the migration of 12 million customers from its Postbank acquisition to its own IT platform.

Over the weekend, the bank completed what is known as its Unity project with the fourth wave of customers migrated from Postbank systems. There are now 19 million retail and corporate banking customers on Deutsche Bank’s platform.

About a third of Postbank was sold to Deutsche Bank for €2.8bn in 2008 during the global financial crisis, and it completed a full takeover for €6bn in 2012.

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.”

The bank will now “gradually shut down Postbank’s previous IT systems”, and expects to save €300m a year as a result.

In 2020, as part of its move to a single banking platform, the German bank sold off the IT operation of Postbank systems to IT supplier TCS, for a token amount of €1.

Postbank Systems, as the IT unit is known, focuses on retail banking IT. Through the deal, TCS added about 1,500 staff with extensive skills in SAP Banking, and deepened its long-term relationship with Deutsche Bank, one of Europe’s biggest companies.

Migrating huge numbers of customer accounts to new systems can be fraught with risks. In 2018, when Sabadell moved millions of TSB customer accounts from the systems of Lloyds Bank – which had hosted them since TSB was separated from Lloyds – to a new core banking platform, disaster struck.

Over a five-day period, users were locked out, experienced money disappearing, and some were even able to see other customers’ accounts. This resulted in a £48.65m fine from UK finance regulators for failures that led to problems.

Then CEO Paul Pester fell on his sword, leaving the company soon after the disaster, and earlier this year, The Prudential Regulation Authority at the Bank of England fined former TSB CIO Carlos Abarca £81,620 for his part in the catastrophic migration of the bank’s IT to a new system.