Commerzbank Aktiengesellschaft - CMVM

32 MANAGEMENT REPORT
independent selection and control of SEI, one of the world’s leading companies
in the area of investment consultants. This will give them access to the best
managers in all the relevant markets and investment styles. Through the cooperation
with SEI Investments, our investors will achieve far better performance for
their company funds, especially over the medium to long term.
Commerzbank is the first bank in Germany to conclude such an exclusive
cooperation agreement with a broadly-based manager-of-managers platform.
Mezzanine to overcome weak capital base
With our new product initiative “Mezzanine for the Mittelstand”, we are seeking
to tackle a core problem of Germany’s smaller businesses: their overly high
debt/equity ratios. By offering mezzanine financing, we are expressing our confidence
in their future. They can then receive the liable funds to enable them to
realize their investment plans without having to restrict their decision-making
scope. The mezzanine funds are made available by our subsidiary Commerz
Beteiligungsgesellschaft and have an average lifetime of five to seven years.
Our goal: more Mittelstand customers
In the current business year as well, Corporate Banking is set to steer an expansion
course. In the Mittelstand segment in particular, we want to gain new customers
and raise the proportion of such companies which have a Commerzbank
account from its present level of 39%. An important role in this connection is
played by our four financial engineering centres set up in 2002, providing onthe-spot
support for our corporate relationship managers in the form of quality
structured and corporate-finance products. We will do all that is in our power to
complement our attractive product range in the areas of interest-rate, currency
and liquidity-risk management, transaction and cash management, as well as
international trade and export financing by adding innovative solutions
designed for Mittelstand firms. At the same time, our Mittelstand offensive is
intended to help make our corporate business as a whole more profitable.
“Move to the top”
At the start of 2004, our Bank’s entire Corporate Banking repositioned itself. We
gave this important corporate project the name “Move to the top”. The main
emphasis in this repositioning is to make a clear distinction in the support which
we provide for our key target groups – on the one hand, for smaller businesses
at our 20 main branches with more than 150 sales locations; on the other, for the
larger corporates centres, specialized in dealing with our larger corporate customers
in the major business locations of Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt,
Stuttgart and Munich. Retaining our successful existing practice, we will continue
to look after roughly 100 selected multinationals from our head office, applying
a global relationship management approach. With this systematic target-group
orientation, we will further strengthen our excellent competitive position.
Experts at finding solutions for such management problems as interest and
currency risk or complex solutions in the area of cash and transaction management
are available to support these customer segments. They are assigned to
the newly formed product areas Interest, Currency & Liquidity Management
(ICLM) and Trade Finance & Transaction Services (TFTS), which have a single
management. Maintaining the previous successful arrangement, a qualified