Postbank has more customers than any other bank in Germany at 11.5 million. It has gained well over 400,000 customers per year since 2001, thus expanding its customer base of ten million customers by 1.5 million. This corresponds to a 15 percent increase. In this figure of 11.5 million customers, Postbank only includes the customers who took out a product with the bank or undertook an active account transaction in the past twelve months. Four million of these are core customers of the bank, meaning that they use Postbank as their key relationship bank or are linked with it by means of several products. Postbank is Germany's largest retail bank with 11.5 million customers, followed by Deutsche Bank with 8.4 million and Dresdner Bank with 4.5 million. Postbank has thus increased its customer reach to nine percent (as at October 2003). In 2002 it was 8.3 percent, up 0.5 percentage points on 2001.

In the past year, just under four percent of all bank customers in Germany opened a new bank account, changed banks or gave notice of termination. Postbank established this in a market research study. The terms were cited as the main reason for switching to another bank. However, poor service and bad advice as well as inadequate local representation prompted customers to switch banks. The key factors in selecting a new bank were more favorable terms, special investment products and easy accessibility of the bank.

Postbank customers are among the most satisfied bank customers in Germany, according to the findings of the "Kundenmonitor Deutschland 2003" German customer survey. 60 percent of customers are completely satisfied or very satisfied with Postbank's services. Postbank thus again holds an excellent second place among banks and savings banks. It performed significantly better than the entire sector. Since 1997, Postbank has enjoyed a significant upswing. Our key advantage is our strong price/performance ratio. However, our range of services, fast execution of orders and clear forms and documents also received a positive assessment. 72 percent of customers were completely satisfied or very satisfied with the correct handling of transactions.

From April 3 to July 15 this year, the "Kundenmonitor Deutschland 2003" German customer survey questioned 5,000 German citizens on their satisfaction with banks and savings banks, over 600 of them about Postbank alone.