Banks under pressure to act on risk management. The industrialisation of the banking landscape in Germany is proceeding apace. This is one of the main results of this year’s autumn meeting of the e-finance lab. “From a contemporary point of view, processing in the subsidiaries’ back office can be compared with the work of craftsmen and centralised operations centres with early manufacturing. With the advent of transaction banking the banking sector has developed an equivalent to contemporary industry for the first time. For it is only now possible to process high transaction volumes at low unit costs", Dr. Mario Daberkow, head of banking organisation at the Deutsche Postbank described the newest developments at the conference.

According to Daberkow, the regulatory requirements of Basel II, SOX and EU harmonisation are increasing competitive pressure on the banks and also pressure to act. A further result of the event: apart from standardisation of internal processes, transaction banking forces banks into improved operational risk management, as non-payment risks tend to be more significant, process errors have a greater impact and make greater demands of potential contractors and clients.