Deutsche Bank has discovered that it has “forgotten” tens of thousands of customer complaints

Deutsche Bank has discovered that there are thousands of forgotten and unresolved complaints at Postbank's retail operation in Germany, inside sources told the Financial Times . A blow to the image and credibility of the German credit group.

The backlog of customer service problems emerged months after the German lender promised to quickly resolve widespread disruptions caused by a botched IT migration project affecting subsidiary Postbank, which is proving to be a real It's a real disaster.

The inconvenience highlighted the strong deficiencies of the bank's internal management system. CEO Christian Sewing is trying to solve the problems affecting retail clients, apparently undervalued in the management of the institution to a degree that has attracted the attention of the German supervisory authority, BaFin.

In November, the bank discovered that the scale of the problem was much larger than it previously thought. Thousands of unresolved retail customer complaints had not been reported or processed properly in its internal workflow software and had continued to pile up. Nobody took care of the customers and their problems, everything was left to itself. Is it possible that no one internally has evaluated this problem?

The discovery triggered a review of the bank's operational processes, leading to the suspension of one employee.

The migration of millions of Postbank customers from one IT system to another began last summer and apparently seemed to have been successfully completed. In reality, the bank was inundated with complaints that were simply not dealt with, they were put aside and no one took care of them. It seems incredible that everything was the responsibility of just one fired operator.

In reality, the problem of mismanagement of the IT transition had been known for some time: in September, BaFin publicly reprimanded Deutsche Bank for the inconveniences suffered by customers of its retail division, reminding the bank that it was required to "respect the deadlines established by law for the protection of customers".

Sewing later apologized for the problems, admitting that the bank had let customers down. “Now we must work even harder to resolve the problems quickly and completely and regain trust,” he said in late September, promising that the issue would be resolved by the end of the year.

DB claims to have made notable progress in managing the backlog, but, in the meantime, problems for customers continue and it will take several weeks to reach a definitive solution.