Commerzbank: Driving customer-centric banking experiences with Google Cloud
About Commerzbank
With 30,000 corporate clients and 11 million private and small-business customers in Germany, Commerzbank is one of the country’s leading financial services providers. By combining digital innovation with a customer-centered approach and a focus on sustainability, Commerzbank strives to create added value for customers, employees, and society as a whole.
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Contact usCommerzbank modernizes its legacy infrastructure with Google Cloud and leverages data analytics and machine learning tools to provide customers with cutting-edge financial services applications.
Google Cloud results
- Modernizes Commerzbank’s infrastructure by migrating 135 Oracle databases for 35 applications in less than nine months
- Speeds up launch of new banking applications by facilitating a CI/CD approach driving agility and flexibility
- Gives customers more visibility into financial data while accelerating loan processing
Migrating 85% of decentralized apps to the cloud by 2024
What will banking look like 15 years from now? Going by current trends, it will be more customer-centric, mobile, and personalized than ever before. The world is becoming more fast paced, and people crave financial services that meet their changing needs. Recognizing this, traditional banks are stepping up their digital journeys.
“Our main IT challenge is to maintain and replace legacy landscapes while leveraging the benefits of new technologies in a sector with high regulatory requirements. That’s where Google Cloud comes in.”
—Christoph Beetz, Managing Director and Principal Project Manager, CommerzbankFounded in 1870, Commerzbank is one of Germany’s largest banking institutions for private and corporate customers. It serves around 30,000 corporate clients and around 11 million private and small-business customers in Germany. Like most traditional banks, Commerzbank began building its core banking IT environment in the 1970s. Over the years, many of these core applications were replaced by new technologies. Nevertheless, there are still some complex legacy infrastructure environments in place.
“Our main IT challenge is to maintain and replace legacy landscapes while leveraging the benefits of new technologies in a sector with high regulatory requirements,” says Christoph Beetz, Managing Director and Principal Project Manager at Commerzbank. “That’s where, inter alia, Google Cloud comes in.”
Building cloud expertise for the future of financial services
Commerzbank’s digital transformation is ongoing. The bank is increasingly leveraging cloud technology to bring new products and customer experiences to life, while reducing operating costs and strengthening performance. As part of its Strategy 2024, Commerzbank strives to run 85% of its decentralized applications in the cloud by 2024 with a hybrid multicloud approach. Google Cloud has been an important part of that journey since 2017.
In 2021, Commerzbank and Google Cloud deepened their collaboration with a new strategic agreement to prepare the bank’s upcoming mass migration to the cloud. This partnership is rooted in mutual trust and pragmatic ways of working together. To build cloud capabilities internally, the Commerzbank team made use of extensive training with the Google Cloud team.
“You only learn things when you do them,” explains Gerald Hahn, Managing Director and Cluster Lead at Commerzbank. “When we began this journey, we were very interested in cloud technology and eager to employ it, but we had little experience. Working with Google Cloud, we grow it with every use case.“
“Across Commerzbank and Google Cloud, we work together closely to ensure each migration is seamless,” adds Beetz.
For more difficult tasks, the team established so-called speedboat pods. These are more focused groups where Commerzbank’s cloud and application teams work hand in hand with solution architects from Google Cloud. Reusable patterns are implemented and thoroughly tested so that future applications with similar technical requirements can use Google’s cloud services and follow the bank’s high security and compliance standards more easily. By systematically building on internal cloud expertise, Commerzbank is on track to achieve its ambitious transformation goals by 2024.
“With its Bare Metal Solution for Oracle, Google Cloud enables us to bring our Oracle workloads and databases to the cloud securely. So far, we’ve migrated 135 Oracle databases for 35 of our applications, bridging closely to Google Cloud and facilitating our migration to open source systems.”
—Gerald Hahn, Managing Director and Cluster Lead, CommerzbankA new infrastructure for a new chapter of Commerzbank
Commerzbank is increasingly building its digital future in a modern, hybrid multicloud environment. And as some of Commerzbank’s on-premises hardware neared the end of its support life, the team was confident that it could find a new home for a large part of its Oracle estate with Google Cloud.
“With its Bare Metal Solution for Oracle, Google Cloud enables us to bring parts of our Oracle workloads and databases near to the cloud securely,” says Hahn. “So far, we’ve migrated 135 Oracle databases for 35 of our applications, bridging closely to Google Cloud and facilitating our migration to open source systems.”
BMS for Oracle is a tactical solution from which Commerzbank benefits in three ways. First, Commerzbank can run its Oracle databases on a cost-effective, highly secure, regulatory-compliant and high-performing hardware platform, avoiding a replacement capital investment for its existing on-premises Oracle platform. Second, the bank can leverage the low-latency interconnect between BMS and the bank’s cloud environment, provided and fully managed by Google. Third, the bank can modernize existing applications by using cloud-native services while running the database back end on BMS and, where possible, migrate databases from Oracle to PostgreSQL running in a fully managed CloudSQL environment on Google Cloud.
“By leveraging Google Cloud solutions to collect, tap into, and analyze all our data, the digital account analysis feature gives our teams and our customers more visibility over their financial data. Among many other things, this enables us to process loan applications much faster, resulting in a better customer experience.”
—Christoph Beetz, Managing Director and Principal Project Manager, CommerzbankEmpowering customers with transparent financial data
Customer centricity is at the heart of Commerzbank’s push into the cloud. With its modernized infrastructure, the bank can bring new customer experiences to market faster and deliver new features more dynamically with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
Commerzbank's customers are already using the first application developed on Google Cloud. “A first example of our successful cooperation with Google Cloud is the Digitale Kontoanalyse, our digital account analysis tool, from which both our customers and employees benefit in many ways,” says Carsten Bittner, Head of Technology Foundations and Chief Technology Officer of Commerzbank.
Using this tool, it is now possible to track, for example, financial data to create accurate balance sheets of income and expenses for customer accounts. This empowers customers to optimize their income and expenditure behavior over time.
“By leveraging Google Cloud solutions to collect, tap into, and analyze all our data, the digital account analysis feature gives our teams and our customers more visibility over their financial data,” explains Beetz. “Among many other things, this enables us to process loan applications much faster, resulting in a better customer experience.”
Using AI to enhance the customer experience
With its infrastructure migration on schedule, the Commerzbank team can increasingly tap into the data analytics, AI, and machine learning capabilities of Google Cloud to add value for its customers. The bank’s new account analysis tool is only the first of many cutting-edge financial apps that will enhance the user experience for Commerzbank customers in the coming years.
For its retail banking customers, Commerzbank has been developing a mobile push gateway to send out notifications to customers about its financial activities instantaneously. The mobile-push gateway uses Google Cloud services to provide a highly available, secure, and robust notification service that sends out messages in near real time, so that customers gain confidence that their financial transactions are performed as expected and without delay. This means that customers are always up-to-date and receive timely notifications, increasing trust and confidence in their financial services partner. And Commerzbank is also developing conversational applications for its planned remote advisory centers, to improve customer communications and to support solving repetitive tasks in its customer service center.
With its Strategy 2024 and beyond, Commerzbank lays the groundwork for a new chapter in its long and storied history. Now that all new projects are based on cloud technology, having the right cloud partners at its side is invaluable for Commerzbank’s IT team.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Commerzbank
With 30,000 corporate clients and 11 million private and small-business customers in Germany, Commerzbank is one of the country’s leading financial services providers. By combining digital innovation with a customer-centered approach and a focus on sustainability, Commerzbank strives to create added value for customers, employees, and society as a whole.