Commerzbank enables truly customer-centric services powered by Axway

Commerzbank is a leading German bank with an international presence, serving private and small business customers as well as corporates, multinationals, financial service providers, and institutional clients.

They are not new Axway API customers, but as a result of legal mandates like PSD2 and open banking, their use of our platform has matured and even altered. They’re currently focusing on providing customer-centric services and attracting new partners via their platform.

Discover their amazing story through the voices of:

According to Christoph Berentzen, “For over 150 years, banks operated a closed organizational structure because being shut off from the outside world was seen as synonymous with security. Today, regulatory requirements such as PSD2 and open banking — and the booming popularity of online and mobile services — mean that the opposite is true. While security is as vital as ever, opening ourselves up to the wider financial services ecosystem is crucial to deliver the new, responsive services our customers expect.”

To achieve its transformation goal, Commerzbank aimed to reimagine its banking workflows from the perspective of the end customer. First, the bank looked to build a robust, API-powered architecture that could support new, open services.

Security needs

In the beginning, Commerzbank chose Amplify API Management Platform for security reasons, as the foundation for its new API-driven service architecture. By deploying secure gateways, the bank has gained a solid basis for digital innovation.

 “When selecting an API management solution, security, ease of integration and maintainability were our key criteria — and we are very impressed with the performance of the Amplify platform in these areas. When we embarked on our transformation, APIs were relatively new to us. However, Axway are experts in API management, and the support and guidance we’ve received from the Axway team along the way have been invaluable.”, says Volker Sulzbach 

Our APIs are growing explosively…

To help support the development of data-driven services for internal as well as external stakeholders, Commerzbank has so far developed 150 strategic APIs. These include core capabilities such as authentication and authorization, as well as payments and account-level data sharing — supporting new applications for clients and laying the foundation for API monetization.

“Our APIs are growing explosively: from around 2 million requests per month in the first year of using the Amplify platform to 11 million requests per month last year, and more than 130 million requests per month this year. With these APIs as a foundation, we can deliver high-quality online and mobile services to our customers, which helps us to foster their loyalty and reduce the risk of churn. Our transformation initiative has been so successful that we’re now aiming to build more than 300 strategic APIs by the end of 2024, and additional tactical APIs to support specific projects.” Christoph Berentzen 

Revenue streams, establishing a partner ecosystem:

“For a number of years, we relied on manual or batch processes to share data with our wealth management partners — but this way of working made it difficult for them to feed their business systems with timely data, when we launched our first APIs, we saw an opportunity to transform this process and add value to our partners by offering near-real-time data as a service. Our monetized APIs make it faster and more efficient for partners to leverage our data, while also creating new revenue streams for Commerzbank.” Christoph Berentzen

Commerzbank is also using its APIs to forge new fintech partnerships.

Sulzbach confirms that “We’re harnessing secure APIs to offer consumer loans via smava, a company that aggregates quotes from multiple providers to help customers find the best product for their needs. Just six weeks after smava reached out to ask if we’d like to be part of their platform, we stood up a minimum viable product in a test environment. Before we started our work with Axway, the same project would have taken us at least six months — so this was an incredible result.”

 “More and more of our customers are using Commerzbank banking apps, and many of our corporate clients are integrating our APIs into their own digital services.Today, very few people would choose to call a bank advisor to perform a transactional process they could complete for themselves online or on mobile. Through our work with Axway, we are empowering our customers to access powerful self-service capabilities — contributing to higher satisfaction.” Christoph Berentzen

Katharina Berner stated that “In the last month, several new customers have cited the catalog of APIs on our public portal as one of the main reasons they decided to engage with Commerzbank. Our digital transformation is having a very positive impact on the business: we’re attracting customers with help from our APIs, gaining market share because we’re integrated with fintech ecosystems, and growing our revenues through our own partner network.”

Berentzen concludes “From the very beginning, Axway has been a true strategic partner to Commerzbank. We know we can count on Axway to help us build and refine a new generation of customer-centric services.”