COMMERZBANK AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT

Group Management Report
152
96 Commerzbank Annual Report 2011
Business customers – skills bundled together
For our business customers – companies and self-employed persons with a turnover of up to
€2.5m – we expanded our range of services and bundled our skills in 2011. This way we set
down important markers for sustained growth in an expanding market. We aim to become
the principal bank for business customers in Germany. In concrete terms, this means that for
entrepreneurs, we are a reliable business partner in all financial matters, from the processing
of payment transactions to professional liquidity management.
As a basis for this, we opened 65 business customer advisory centres in major cities as in
July 2011. Customers have an allocated contact person who is supported if necessary by the
broadly based teams of experts. In addition to specialist knowledge in individual product areas
such as securities and pensions, we provide competent contact persons who have a sector
focus, such as for doctors, tax advisors or lawyers. We started a nationwide training programme
for our advisors to ensure high quality standards in our customer advice.
We significantly optimised the range of services in core product fields of payment transactions
and lending throughout the year. This included improving the autopilot function on
deposit accounts for automated liquidity management, ensuring that customers can easily
and independently transfer funds between their current and deposit accounts. In lending we
made the application process much more customer-oriented with significantly shorter decision-making
paths, and in particular adjusted the pricing structure for investment and subsidised
loans.
We addressed our customers’ need for advice in advisory initiatives. Here the marketing
focus for the business portion lay in payment transactions and lending, for the private portion
in securities business. By actively advising our customers, particularly on liquidity
management and deposits, we managed to significantly improve new business throughout
the year.
Wealth Management – business model expanded further
Wealth Management provides services to particularly wealthy private clients who have complex
asset management requirements. As one of the leading providers in Germany, we now
offer a nationwide network of advisors throughout Germany in 43 locations. This is supplemented
by Commerzbank International S.A. (CISAL) as a competence centre for international
wealth management. With international teams of multilingual experts who have extensive
market and technical know-how, we meet the individual needs of wealthy customers who
have worldwide interests. At year-end 2011, our team of approx. 860 staff managed more
than 35,000 mandates in Germany and Luxembourg, representing assets worth around
€48bn.
We continued to expand our portfolio of services in Wealth Management in 2011. The new offering
of the “Individual risk analysis” appeals to our customers’ raised risk awareness in the difficult
market environment and in concrete terms, highlights for customers the risks in their portfolios,
regardless of whether their custody account is with us or with a competitor. With the new
“Property report”, the central Family Office offers tailored analysis and valuation solutions that
cover all types of property assets and enable property investments to be managed. Another new
service is “Wealth planning” for individual concepts formulated as finance plans. Against the
background of current developments on the markets, it is especially important to subject all components
of wealth to intensive examination and to formulate investment decisions on this basis.