Two years after announcing the takeover of Dresdner Bank, and 18 months scine the merger was consummated, Commerzbank says many integration objectives have been achieved earlier than planned. Around 1600 branches and other buildings, including more than 700 former Dresdner Bank locations, have now been rebranded with the new corporate design, and since mid-June all customers can take advantage of basic services such as deposits and transfers at all of the bank's branches.

Commerzbank says it has massively upgraded capacity across its technological backbone in anticipation of the migration of Dresdner Bank customer data to its own systems and the decommissioning of legacy Dresdner tech.

"In August, we achieved an important milestone for the merger of the IT systems on schedule, with the largest roll-out of software in the history of Commerzbank. We have thereby put in place the necessary conditions for migrating the business and customer data of the former Dresdner Bank to the Commerzbank systems and processing them there," says Frank Annuscheit, responsible for group services at Commerzbank. "To do so, we significantly increased system capacity and ensured that it was fit for the future. We want to complete the IT integration process in the second quarter of 2011 as planned."

Synergies from the merger should add up to around EUR1.1 billion by the end of the year, says the bank, exceeding original expectations by 10%. Total savings of EUR2.4 billion are expected to be realised from 2013.