Bafin imposes a million-dollar fine on Deutsche Bank because of IT breakdowns affecting Postbank customers

Blocked accounts, delayed financing, lots of complaints: Germany's largest financial institution will have to pay a fine of millions in 2023 because of problems with moving Postbank customers to a common IT platform.

According to its own information, the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (Bafin) imposed a fine of eight million euros on Deutsche Bank.

Specifically, in 2023 the bank “did not take appropriate organizational precautions to immediately deal with the higher volume of customer complaints that arose from the migration of customer data,” Bafin said.

In addition, the bank did not immediately execute orders to transfer the securities account.

Starting at Easter 2022, Deutsche Bank brought together data from twelve million Postbank customers and seven million Deutsche Bank customers in Germany on a common platform in four waves (“Project Unity”).

In the course of the IT change, there was an increasing number of complaints from customers who, for example, were temporarily unable to access their accounts.

The second wave of data transfer around New Year's Eve 2022/2023 was the main cause of anger among customers, when, among other things, securities depots were affected.

At the time, Bafin had complained about “significant impairments in the processing of customer business at Postbank” and appointed a special representative to monitor whether Deutsche Bank could get the problems under control.

The Bafin has now imposed a fine of 5.5 million euros for the “too slow processing of customer complaints”, and Deutsche Bank has to pay a further 2.5 million euros because it delayed executing orders to transfer the securities account.

"We have comprehensively examined and resolved the problems that existed several years ago in connection with Postbank's IT migration to Deutsche Bank and have continuously improved our processes since then," said a spokesman for Deutsche Bank when asked by the dpa news agency.

Deutsche Bank accepts Bafin's decision.