Status: 09/30/2022 3:06 p.m
Commerzbank continues to shrink its branch network in Germany: Instead of 450 locations, the board is only relying on 400 branches. According to ver.di, there will be no further job cuts.
Commerzbank wants to close another 50 branches in Germany. This means that in the future there will only be 400 branches instead of 450, as it became known after discussions between the management and the supervisory board. A spokesman for the Frankfurt Institute did not want to comment on the information initially reported by the “Handelsblatt”.
Ver.di: “We support it”
Ver.di trade union secretary Stefan Wittmann, who is a member of the Commerzbank supervisory board, told the dpa news agency: “We support this: customer behavior is changing. Due to the reduction in staff, there are no longer enough qualified consultants available logical to further reduce the number of branches to around 400.”
Most of these are branches that were temporarily closed during the corona pandemic and are now no longer open, Wittmann explained. He emphasized: “There should be no further staff cuts.”
In contrast to many other financial institutions, Commerzbank had long held on to a comparatively dense branch network. Before the pandemic began, the institute still had around 1,000 locations nationwide.
There is a dispute about payment at subsidiaries
At the beginning of 2021, the head of the group, Manfred Knof, who took over as a reorganizer, radically changed direction, the number of branches in the German market was reduced from 790 to 450 at the time. Knof recently told “Bild am Sonntag” that the target of 450 “cannot be set in stone”: the world is changing too quickly for that.
According to Wittmann, there is still a dispute about payment at the Commerzbank subsidiary ComTS, which, among other things, helps with the processing of payment transactions. Wittmann criticized that employers were not even willing to offer ver.di an appointment for a meeting. Therefore there will be walkouts at all ComTS locations next Tuesday.