Deutsche Postbank AG is aiming to achieve further growth in the area of transaction banking. This was underlined by Dr. Mario Daberkow, Postbank’s General Manager responsible for Services, talking to journalists in Frankfurt/Main. “From the very start, our transaction settlement platform was constructed with a view to processing large volumes. It is fully scalable and grows to reflect increasing transaction volumes. As our systems are multi-client enabled, other financial service providers can also perform transaction settlement via Postbank without this affecting their customers,” Daberkow noted.

Industrialization: lower costs and higher quality
Since 1999, Postbank has been pursuing a systematic strategy of industrialization in the area of transaction banking. Mario Daberkow explained, “We have centralized and largely automated our production activities and optimized process efficiency across the board. This has allowed us not only to reduce costs, but also to improve quality. The error rate has fallen significantly, and we are now averaging less than one error per million transactions.”

Since 2004, Postbank has been responsible for processing most of Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank’s payment transactions. It also entered into a preliminary agreement with HypoVereinsbank on future cooperation in the area of transaction banking in 2006. Postbank is aiming to gain additional clients in Germany and to expand its model into the rest of Europe. However, this will require payment transactions in the euro zone to be broadly harmonized.

Banking factory: six billion payment transactions a year
Postbank processes more than six billion payment transactions a year for itself and its customers. In 2004, it established “Betriebs-Center für Banken Deutschland” (BCB). This Frankfurt-based “banking factory”, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Postbank, specializes in account-related settlement services such as transaction banking.

Credit factory in Hamelin in development
Following the acquisition of BHW in 2006, Postbank is also able to offer low-cost, efficient loan processing to other financial service providers. BHW had previously already taken over the management of existing loans for third parties, including DEVK, SwissLife and KfW. “Our plan is to expand these activities rapidly with the aim of creating a credit factory,” explained Daberkow. “From 2008, the new factory in Hamelin should not only be able to process all of Postbank’s loans, but also be in a position to settle loans for additional clients.” In late July, loan processing for construction loans in Hamelin was fully converted to SAP standard software. This means that the credit factory in Hamelin is already one of the largest users of this software in the world.