Frankfurt (Reuters) – Deutsche Bank has rediscovered the payment processing business.
The largest German financial institution wants to deepen its cooperation with the credit card provider Mastercard and offer its 800,000 corporate customers solutions for digital payment transactions, as the bank announced on Wednesday. She hopes that this will result in increased commission income. “We believe that we can gain a relevant market share and we will have a significant share in the growth of the corporate bank,” said Ole Matthiessen, who is responsible for the business area at Deutsche Bank.
Until a few years ago, the payment transaction business was still unpopular at Deutsche Bank and other financial institutions. In 2017, the German banking industry sold its payment provider Concardis to a consortium of financial investors. The company is now part of the Danish provider Nets. The entire payment industry is growing rapidly due to the trend towards more Internet purchases, and more and more customers are paying in shops with cards or their smartphones. The management consultancy McKinsey expects sales growth of six percent by 2023.
Matthiessen did not want to say how much income the cooperation with Mastercard should bring in Deutsche Bank. The institute is confident that it will attract a large number of corporate customers to the new products. In Europe there is no other large bank that offers a similarly wide range of payment transaction services, said Deutsche Bank manager Kilian Thalhammer, whom the institute has poached from the insolvent Wirecard AG.
The competition in the field of payment providers is fierce and there have been some takeovers recently. In the industry, size counts to leverage economies of scale and save costs. The French group Worldline grabbed Ingenico, Nexi from Italy absorbed the Danish Nets. There were also several billion-dollar takeovers in the USA. Payment service providers process payments on behalf of merchants, integrate payment methods in online shops and take on additional services such as protection against fraudulent transactions. The Wirecard bankruptcy brought negative headlines to the industry.