Open banking is transforming the financial industry, and Commerzbank leverages Axway Amplify to create innovative fintech partnerships and new business models.
Commerzbank is a leading German private and corporate bank with international presence. In order to better serve their customers with added-value digital services, the bank shifted from the traditional banking market to the open banking market. Powered by Axway’s Amplify API Management Platform, Commerzbank is now able to create new business models enabling innovative fintech partnerships.
Commerzbank is the second largest German private bank with a strong focus on the German market. We have a history of 150 years now, and we see that client needs have changed. The market has changed, leading to a shift from the traditional banking market to the digital banking market. In the SME and corporate context, this means a shift towards the open banking market. Therefore, the bank has to reorient itself to new business models, which are enabled by open banking—essentially, APIs.
Explore the Commerzbank Developer Portal
When we started with our API program, we didn't just build APIs like any others. We aimed to have a reliable and stable platform as the basis for our program. One of the criteria we set up was reliability. Another was security, and the third was stable and robust catalog management. With Axway Amplify, we found a solution that perfectly met these three criteria.
It wasn't just about setting up the platform; it was also about how to use the platform, how to use API management at Commerzbank, and what we could do with it. We had the Axway Catalyst team with us, who helped us a lot by training management and developers, and helping us understand how to use API management effectively.
APIs bring value to retail clients by integrating third-party services into our applications, such as our app or online banking, where we can offer added value services to them. Of course, we can also integrate our products into third-party systems to serve our clients' needs where they are. For example, the CO2 calculator brings a lot of value to the customer. This is a feature we didn't have to build ourselves; we integrated it from external companies into our platform and mobile app. This is what customers expect today from our bank: not just banking services, but near-banking services or even beyond-banking services.
A platform or API gateway makes this process much more efficient, faster, and easier, which means we are saving costs. Time to market is key, and the Axway Amplify platform has helped us a lot by speeding up development and deployment from weeks to days and even hours. That's a great success. The architecture was designed to handle millions of calls per day. Initially, we had two to three million calls per month, but now we exceed 6, 10, or even 12 million per day without any performance issues.
We are very proud of this. With the developer portal, we can showcase our offerings to the market and demonstrate the APIs we want to provide. We also monetize these APIs because they add real value. We know that we can count on Axway as a strategic partner to build customer-centric services for our clients.
