Germany's major banks are accustomed to reporting their results for more than one accounting standard. In recent years they have had to submit annual financial statements and consolidated financial statements under both IFRS and German accounting standards. At the same time, they have been required to disclose increasingly detailed information about their assets, finances and earnings. This trend is set to continue as the latest standard, IFRS 9, which changes how financial instruments are measured, comes into force soon.

SAP Bank Analyzer calculates the detailed values required by different accounting standards in parallel by using mostly automated processes, a separate subledger and a standard set of data. This enables banks to produce the various financial statements in a timely manner and provide them to the different lines of business, thus helping ensure that the figures are as accurate and consistent as possible and speeding up the process as a whole.

Commerzbank will use SAP Bank Analyzer for its financial reporting. It will lead the implementation project and work closely with the SAP Consulting organization and other partners. The set of applications will be implemented in several stages, the first of which focuses on Germany.

"Wherever it makes sense to do so, we use standard software to manage our bank," said Frank Annuscheit, chief operating officer, Commerzbank. "In SAP, we have a partner for this project whose software gives us the functions and flexibility we need."

"With SAP Bank Analyzer, all the data needed for the entire financial reporting process is available at anytime in one system, in the right quality, and at the right speed," said Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEO, SAP AG. "This is vital in the highly regulated banking sector."

In addition to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) application SAP® ERP, Commerzbank has been using the SAP® for Banking solution portfolio since 2007.