Postbank Goes Live with SAPs New Solution for High-Volume Transaction Banking

With SAP for Banking, Postbank has replaced 14 legacy systems and reduced the number of standard banking processes from more than 120 to 35. Now managing processes for 10 million customers, 6 million debit cards, 5 million checking accounts and 40 million address records on a single, standard software platform, the company anticipates annual reductions in back-office operating costs of up to 30 percent. The go-live at Postbank marks the successful completion of an extensive development effort at SAP that extends the functionality in SAP for Banking to enable large banks and financial service providers to run their comprehensive core banking processes on a single IT platform. More than 6,000 Postbank employees at five back-office locations as well as employees at more than 10,000 Deutsche Post offices in Germany gain access to the new functionality. SAP for Banking also handles the accounts and transactions of all of Postbanks 1.5 million online banking customers. Postbank intends to leverage the high-volume capacity of SAPs transaction banking functionality to generate new revenue by offering transaction processing services to other banks. The flexible, SAP-based platform is also expected to reduce the banks time-to-market for new products from months to only a few weeks. Traditionally, large banks infrastructure for managing accounts and diverse product lines comprises multiple core banking systems and numerous processes stemming from years of in-house development. With SAP for Banking, Postbank takes the technology lead in the banking sector as the first large retail bank to demonstrate that account management, transaction processing for all payments, as well as new product configuration, can be run successfully on a single, standardized, real-time system. Postbank went live with the new functionality in SAP for Banking this month. The implementation is being led by Postbank and supported by SAP. Also, SAP provides Postbank with its MaxAttention(TM) support that delivers all the benefits of SAP Standard Support, plus a broad selection of premium services, such as 24/7 service and on-site consultants. Transaction banking with SAP enables high-volume, high-performance processing of current accounts as well as debit and credit cards, enabling faster processes, fewer errors and greater visibility across products and cash accounts. With the powerful processing capabilities on the standard platform, Postbank plans to transform operational functions to profit centers, offering other banks insourced processing of payment transactions and account management. By enabling Postbank to configure new financial products across traditional product lines easily and shorten time-to-market, SAPs flexible, cross-division software solutions give Postbank significant strategic advantage in a competitive, rapidly changing market, where bank-product life cycles are becoming ever shorter. Postbank also anticipates long-term strategic advantages with the new platform, including faster and more cost- efficient integration of IT and operations during potential mergers. The company calculates that, leveraging SAP for Banking solutions, system integration could be achieved within one to one-and-a-half years, reducing integration costs considerably. Postbank is a long-time customer of SAPs financials, loans and controlling components in SAP R/3 and will also use the SAP Basel II solution to help achieve compliance with international banking regulations. The company also uses SAP Business Information Warehouse as its reporting platform, and its Banking Information Center (BIC) is based on SAPs records management. The November 2002 launch of the business partner for financial services (FS-BP) component at Postbank was the largest deployment ever of this SAP for Banking component, enabling the bank to manage key data on its 10 million customers and more than 40 million addr