Deutsche Bank plans to cut Postbank branch network by nearly half
Frankfurt-headquartered Deutsche Bank is reportedly planning to close nearly half of its 550 Postbank branches within the next three years.
Deutsche Bank set to close 250 Postbank branches
Claudio de Sanctis, the bank’s head of private banking, confirmed that the number of Postbank branches would be whittled down to approximately 300 during an interview with the Financial Times this week.
Of the 300 remaining locations, 100 are expected to shift their attention exclusively to servicing the banking needs of on-site customers, while 200 will continue to offer Postbank’s postal and parcel services.
De Sanctis says that there is a possibility that Deutsche Bank’s own bank branches, of which there are 1,443 worldwide, could also be scaled back, but didn’t provide any further clarity on when this might happen or what the move will look like.
Deutsche Bank acquired Postbank in 2008 to expand its retail banking division following the global financial crash.
Reuters reports that the bank has faced criticism from its workforce following the news of the pending Postbank branch closures being broken this week.
Deutsche Bank board and Ver.di trade union member, Jan Duscheck, told Reuters that the decision comes “at the wrong time” while anticipating that Postbank’s brand image has been “severely damaged”.
This year, a series of service outages reported by Postbank’s clients over the summer caught the attention of Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin), which appointed a customer service supervisor at Deutsche in October as a repercussion.
State-side, the bank was fined $186 million by the US Federal Reserve in July, with the Fed claiming the firm had made “insufficient remedial progress” in fixing its anti-money laundering (AML) controls after it initially flagged concerns with the bank back in 2015 and 2017.
