Postbank’s branch network is being significantly reduced. Deutsche Bank wants to expand its digital channels. And is transferring a model to the yellow brand that has been in place in-house for some time.
Deutsche Bank wants to partially offset Postbank branch closures by setting up regional advisory centers. In the future, private customers will be able to obtain information on financial issues by telephone or video link, even outside of normal branch opening hours and on Saturdays. “We want to significantly change Postbank’s market presence for our customers, away from a more branch-based model and towards a model where the customer can ultimately decide which channels they would like to be served through,” said Lars Stoy, head of Deutsche Bank’s private customer bank in Germany, to the German Press Agency in Frankfurt.
Deutsche Bank has had advisory centers for several years. Postbank teams are now to be added at nine locations: in Hamburg, Berlin, Essen, Schkeuditz, Wuppertal, Mainz, Mannheim, Nuremberg and Munich. In addition, two new pure Postbank advisory centers are planned in Hanover and Bonn. Deutsche Bank wants to set up the new structure in the next few months so that all eleven Postbank advisory centers will be available to customers by 2025.
Cut list at Postbank branches
Deutsche Bank will reduce the number of Postbank branches from 550 to 320 by mid-2026. 200 of the remaining locations will also offer postal services, and 120 will be pure bank branches. “We have made sure that we continue to be well represented in metropolitan areas and also in the wider area,” said Dominik Hennen, who, as Head of Personal Banking, leads the broad private customer business of the Deutsche Bank and Postbank brands. “That won’t work everywhere, but we have made sure that we continue to cover the area well.”
There will “of course be job cuts,” said Hennen. When asked, the bank did not provide exact figures. According to the latest collective agreement with the Verdi union, redundancies are excluded until the end of 2027. The bank wants to transfer customer advisors from branches that are being closed to the advisory centers.
New structure in construction financing
According to the information, Deutsche Bank management has also agreed a leaner structure for the construction financing area with the works councils. “Deutsche Bank has taken over various units over the years and, compared to other banks, we have a relatively complex construction financing world, namely with three processes, three different employee groups and three processing models. We are now consolidating this,” explained Stoy.
“At Deutsche Bank, we worked decentrally at a mid-double-digit number of locations. At BHW, at one location, namely the headquarters in Hameln, and at DSL, at 13 branches,” explained Stoy. “This will now be consolidated into a total of six main locations, each of which has secondary locations, so that we will have a total of around 13 locations.”
Source: Stern
