On the first working day of the new year, the servers of Postbank, which belongs to Deutsche Bank, went down.

After a few hours, the problems were resolved, assured a spokesman for Deutsche Bank when asked.

In general, he drew a positive conclusion: The second wave of the migration of four million product contracts on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day was complex, but succeeded without any difficulties.

Archibald Preuschat

Editor in Business

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Many readers could not understand this assessment at all.

As a Postbank customer, he has only been able to use his account to a very limited extent for ten days, wrote a university professor from Tübingen.

He is not only annoyed by the restricted access to his account, but also by how Postbank, which claims to have 19 million customer contracts, deals with it.

There is no information or assistance on the bank's website.

Standard e-mail without problem reference

In the e-mail contact he gets standard explanations, which neither mention the problem that one cannot transfer at all nor offer any help.

Another reader provided such a standard e-mail: “Dear customer, you have sent us an inquiry.

We are currently receiving a large number of emails.

For this reason we would like to ask you for patience.

Kind regards, Your Postbank e-mail team,” it says.

This e-mail is followed by another e-mail: "Dear customer, thank you very much for your e-mail to Postbank.

I have forwarded your request to our specialist department to be dealt with.

They will take care of it as soon as possible.

If you have any questions, please tell us the ticket ID XXXXXX that we assigned to your email," writes the bank.

It goes on to say: "Good to know: The specialist department will contact you if necessary - for example if you have any questions.

You will then receive a letter, an email or a message in your message box in Postbank online banking.

In individual cases it may be that we deal with your request without further message.

Do you already know our questions and answers portal?

Here you will receive direct answers to many questions.

Just take a look at the portal.

Kind regards, Your Postbank e-mail team.” But even if the hotline can be reached, the answers are just as unhelpful, the reader from Tübingen explains: “The problem will be solved in a few hours,” he was told by granted to a call center employee.

Long wait for bank statements

Postbank is currently migrating its customers in waves to a shared platform with Deutsche Bank.

Two more waves of migration are ahead before the project, which the institute has dubbed Unity, is completed in the middle of the year.

Germany's largest commercial bank was well aware that it was not an easy undertaking.

The 2021 Annual Report already said: "One of these initiatives, UNITY, which aims to simplify our IT landscape by migrating the IT systems of the former Postbank to the systems of Deutsche Bank, is facing important milestones at the beginning of 2022 ."