Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank and HVB have abandoned plans to merge their payments processing back offices after deciding that the upfront costs of the venture would outweigh future cost-savings, according to a report in the Financial Times.
The paper quotes a statment from HVB: "As a result of additional costs that would have to be invested into this project over the next four year, all three banks decided to part with the project in this form."
The banks had hoped to cut back office costs by 30% by using a single shared platform for processing their combined annual total of four billion cash, cheque and electronic payments.
Each bank employs about 1000 back office to handle payments transactions states the report.