Postbank has put its new software for current accounts into operation. The program, which was developed jointly with SAP, now processes payments and account management for the just under five million internal and external bank accounts. “We thus have the most state-of-the-art platform of a bank in Germany, probably in Europe and perhaps even worldwide,” stated Prof. Wulf von Schimmelmann, the Chairman of the Postbank Management Board, to journalists in Frankfurt am Main. He quantified the competitive advantage resulting from the new software as “two to three years. This is a quantum leap. In terms of the future, we have moved into a new dimension.”

With the new program, Postbank has doubled the processing speed of its booking processing and can further reduce costs. "By simplifying all processes, we have reduced complexity costs in transaction banking by 40% since 2001. With the new program, we can reduce costs by a further 30%. To the ten million bookings we now process daily, we can take on more than the same volume, without having capacity problems,” underlines Dirk Berensmann, responsible for IT/Operations at the Bonn-based bank. The assumption of Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank payments, agreed for 2004, can thus be well managed from a technical point of view.

Postbank recently announced its intention of going public. With transaction banking, it wants to create a second area of operations alongside retail banking. Alongside its many years of experience in mass payments, with the new software, the bank can now also offer a technical platform on which it can economically process account-related services for other banks. Postbank views low risk and steady remuneration flows as particular advantages in transaction business with other banks.

Postbank developed the new software together with the Walldorf-based software house, SAP. The program can operate on a real-time basis. For the first time it allows a bank to book round the clock. On the part of Postbank, up to 800 people were involved in the development. The bank considers it a particular success that the project was successfully completed on budget and on time. Over € 200 million were spent for the “IT 2003” project. The largest part has already been amortized by means of realized process optimizations. “We have demonstrated that we can not only cope with IT projects of this scope, but also conclude them successfully and on time. We want to be measured against this standard as a benchmark in the future,” underlined IT executive Dirk Berensmann.