Commerzbank to move applications to Google Cloud in digitisation strategy

By Sunniva Kolostyak

Commerzbank, one of Germany’s biggest banks, has revealed its intentions to move several applications to Google Cloud over the next five years as part of a comprehensive digital transformation strategy.

Commerzbank, which already has a standing partnership with Google Cloud, decided to expand the collaboration for another five years in order to build a cloud transformation organisation and innovate new solutions for the bank’s customers.

The bank started digitising with Google Cloud 2017 and is increasingly using cloud technology to bring new products and customer experiences to market faster. Google will help improve performance and reduce operating costs while helping achieve a transformation goal which includes running 85 per cent of its decentralised applications in the cloud by 2024.

Commerzbank customers are already using the first application developed on Google Cloud Platform, the Digitale Kontoanalyse, a digital account analysis tool for loan application processing, balance sheets and historical financial data tracking.

Commenting, Jörg Hessenmüller, Chief Operating Officer (COO) and member of the Board of Managing Directors of Commerzbank, stated: “In our new ‘Strategy 2024’, a multi-cloud approach continues to play a major role. We will benefit from Google Cloud’s extensive capabilities in infrastructure modernisation, as well as from its know-how in data analytics and machine learning, as one of the pioneers of this technology. As we move to the cloud, Google Cloud is an important strategic partner.”

As part of the expanded agreement, Google will offer a deeper set of platform services. Commerzbank developers will be able to follow a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) approach, enabling them to make updates to code more seamlessly. This means that building and maintaining applications will be faster and easier, ensuring that end users have access to cutting-edge financial apps.

Daniel Holz, vice president, EMEA North Region at Google Cloud, said: “We are excited to work with Commerzbank to help the bank digitally transform. This partnership means that Google Cloud not only satisfies the high regulatory requirements of the financial sector but we also cooperate on industry-wide initiatives such as the Collaborative Cloud Audit Group to provide verifiable transparency against important compliance standards in the financial services industry.”

The Collaborative Cloud Audit Group (CCAG) is a group of financial services firms in Europe that performs pooled audits of cloud providers like Google Cloud to ensure regulatory compliance of their material outsourcing operations.