Google Cloud modernises Commerzbank’s infrastructure

Founded 150 years ago, Commerzbank is one of Germany’s largest banking institutions for private and corporate customers. In the 1970s, as technology became more developed and fast-paced, Commerzbank began to focus on its banking IT infrastructure. While many of its original technologies have evolved over time, some outdated, complex systems remained in place.

Serving approximately 30,000 corporate clients and around 11 million private and small-business customers in Germany, Commerzbank faced the challenge of embracing new technologies for the benefit of its customers, while still maintaining its legacy infrastructure. Having worked closely since 2017, Commerzbank and Google Cloud made a new strategic agreement to prepare for the bank’s upcoming mass migration to the cloud.

Commerzbank has now implemented Strategy 2024, which aims to run 85 per cent of its decentralised applications in the cloud by 2024. This will be done with a hybrid multicloud approach and enable a more mobile, personalised, customer-centric infrastructure than ever before. The migration process has, so far, included using focused groups in which Commerzbank’s cloud and application teams have worked closely with Google Cloud solution architects.

Google Cloud solutions allow Commerzbank to collect, tap into and analyse all data, giving teams and customers more visibility over their financial data. The migration means that Commerzbank can also track financial data and create accurate balance sheets covering income and expenses for customer accounts. It has increased the speed of operations, enabling services such as loan applications to be processed much faster and resulting in an improved customer experience. It also means that the launch of new banking applications will be faster in the future as Google Cloud facilitates a CI/CD approach, driving agility and flexibility.

Google Cloud has modernised Commerzbank’s infrastructure by migrating 135 Oracle databases for 35 applications in under nine months. It has also brought new products and customer experiences to life while as reducing operating costs and strengthening performance.