Germany’s Deutsche Bank has completed a years-long technology integration with Postbank, over a decade after first acquiring the former savings division of Deutsche Bundespost.

On Monday, Germany’s largest bank said that it had wrapped up the fourth and final phase of a tech integration which has caused it issues since the takeover in 2012. Deutsche Bank said that the move would lead to cost savings of €300 million from 2025.

Deutsche Postbank was formed from the demerger of the postal savings division of Deutsche Bundespost in 1990. It was acquired by Deutsche bank during the 2008 global financial crisis and operates as a brand of Deutsche Bank's retail arm. It serves 13 million customers in around 1,000 branches and 700 advisory centres.

Deutsche Bank however has struggled to complete its integration, with some customers not being able to access all services during the period.

Over the past weekend, the bank transferred a final tranche of 4 million contracts of 2 million Postbank customers to a common IT system as part of a drawn-out integration project dubbed 'Unity'. Deutsche Bank had hoped to complete the Unity programme last year, but faced technical difficulties and had to keep the old systems running at a cost to the bank.

With the integration completed, Deutsche Bank now has 19 million customers' contracts from Postbank on a single platform. The bank will now begin to decommission Postbank hardware and software in a further effort to find savings.

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