CASE STUDY
Thanks to a single set of reusable APIs , Commerzbank is empowering its developers to cut development effort by up to 80 % and build customer-facing services faster than ever .
We caught up with Christoph Berentzen , Head of API & Open Banking , Commerzbank , to find out more about the organisation ’ s work with Axway .
As a leading German bank , how do you deal with the pressure to digitally transform and how do the demands of your German customers differ to those in other parts of the world ?
First of all , what we see with Digital Transformation is that customer demands have changed , for example , using mobile apps – which was not the case 20 years ago . This meant that we needed to transform all those systems so that we can easily develop our customer applications in a modern way . Therefore , API transformation is super important to modularise those systems and to make them accessible via restful APIs internally and also externally , which is what we ’ re working on in order to be able to serve our clients with great API functionality .
Those in the German market are specialists on exporting goods which relates to the financial market , and as an early adopter we have to research in that market . I think this is an area where we deal with high pressure because being an early adopter means we must make sure that API security comes first – something of great importance to a bank . We have to collaborate with FinTechs , tech companies and others in order to find out who might be a sustainable partner for us in the world of open banking and ecosystems .
How do your technology capabilities enable you to meet the needs of your customers ?
For us , it was really important to have this API-first approach internally in order to make the internal systems more flexible , reduce the time to market and reduce internal costs because with API , you can reuse existing interfaces repeatedly . This means that for standard services – like a person ’ s data , documents data or accounts data – there are a lot of them internally , and with reuse , we can really save investment budgets and at the same time , manage maintenance budgets . That is something which really helps us to focus more on what is required by the customer instead of struggling with budgets and legacy systems which we enable via restful APIs to be part of the modern apps and other applications .
What is your strategy for innovation and how does Axway help you to achieve your business goals ?
It ’ s really important to provide those services via a central platform and this is where Axway comes into play , so we make use of the Axway Amplify API Management Platform which is our central gateway for API calls at Commerzbank . For example , we enabled our cloud strategy here , we enabled central security guidelines , we enabled monitoring centrally and this is all done through our Axway platform . Our strategy is to create an internal portfolio of strategically relevant services and external relevant services , which is then handled in one central platform and then one central developer catalogue to ensure efficiency .
Can you tell us more about how Axway has helped you to build and refine a new generation of customercentric services ?
This is an area where I think Axway is a good partner because it helped us , for example , in API design and helped us with a lot of exchanges in relation to that .
Turning our attention to the next 12 months , can you tell us what your roadmap for strategic growth and IT innovation looks like ?
In terms of IT innovation , I can only answer that for API banking , but what we do is we will offer more and more external functionality . So we just went live with an external accounts API for clients and we are working on a corporate cards API , as well as on other APIs to enhance internal processes or client processes . So one API that is very interesting for us is in the trade finance business . We will come out with that by the end of the year . We are working on a payment API for instant payments which is , I think , really interesting especially for online platforms . And we ’ re working on another API for customers with locations in foreign countries to get more transparency on their accounts . And I think all of those functionalities will help corporate customers to integrate finance more into their tools and save time just by automating their internal processes with our APIs . �
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