Commerzbank is unable to find a clear course. After his predecessors approached the reorganization of the bank all too hesitantly, the CEO Manfred Knof, who has been in office since the beginning of the year, now has to try at turbo speed to turn things around. The bank is now depressed by the costs of this drastic cure at a time when investments in the future, especially in digitization, are urgently needed. While most of the other major banks were able to report bubbling profits in the second quarter in the past few weeks, Commerzbank had to post a loss of half a billion euros between April and June alone.  

One-off costs for the major renovation would be manageable. But what is even more serious: It is not clear what the bank should actually stand for once it has completed the renovation. Knof wants to position Commerzbank as the “digital advisory bank for Germany”. But is that really a unique selling point between all the credit institutions vying for customers in this country? 

It is indicative of the different corners of the income and earnings contributions in the second quarter.

The bank's venture capital funds contributed EUR 100 million to the result because the investment in a young payment service provider and a digital animal insurer paid off.

The institute “earned” a further 42 million euros from the low-interest TLTRO loans with which the European Central Bank grants the banks a kind of compensation for the penalty interest on the deposits.

The bank made additional contributions to earnings from the fact that it is demanding negative interest rates from more and more customers and that it had to save less money for possible loan defaults due to the waning of the corona pandemic.  

A clear course looks different

It all seems very arbitrary. A clear course looks different. A sustainably functioning business model from which growth can also be generated is rather unrecognizable. For the time being, Commerzbank will remain a junk room that still has to be tidied up until something of value can be found. The fact that some nasty surprises can also come to light was shown two weeks ago when the sale of securities settlement, which was already well advanced, was suddenly called off. This U-turn alone is now burdening the bank with a special write-off of 200 million euros. 

Investors ran away on Wednesday and let the share price, which had been sluggish for years, drop again by more than 4 percent. Even if Knof has made good progress on his restructuring path so far, they apparently lack the imagination as to how Commerzbank should find new growth in the foreseeable future.