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CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Future-Proofing Finance
The highly available implementation of the Papyrus platform at Commerzbank and comdirect represents a strategic investment in the future of one of the largest banks in Germany. The system has not only addressed immediate challenges and replaced the Assentis Doc Family (Smart Communications) at Commerzbank and DOPiX (Quadient) at comdirect but also provided a foundation for continued innovation and growth.
With €510 billion in assets and 42,000 employees worldwide Commerzbank stands as a major pillar of the German banking sector. The bank serves a vast portfolio of over 11 million private and small-business customers, in addition to 70,000 corporate and institutional clients worldwide. Beyond its domestic reach, Commerzbank is a powerhouse in international commerce, facilitating approximately 30% of Germany's foreign trade. To round out its modern service offering, the bank has integrated comdirect as its primary digital brand since 2020, spearheading the Group's online banking and brokerage operations.
Facing the end-of-life of their legacy document platforms — Assentis Doc Family (Smart Communications) and DOPiX (Quadient) — Commerzbank sought a stable, future-proof solution able to seamlessly replicate existing functionalities, integrate with core systems like SAP and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for the smooth flow of information and enable highly personalized customer interactions.
In addition, seeking to maximize synergies, Commerzbank decided to consolidate the Commerzbank and comdirect brands onto a shared, cloud-native platform. Critically, the chosen platform needed to offer automated migration and test tools to facilitate smooth migration of approximately 3,000 existing document templates and meet stringent performance requirements for document creation, processing, and 24/7 availability.
One year after the decision, the partnership between Commerzbank, comdirect, and Papyrus has delivered remarkable results. The ambitious migration of the first tranche of 100 required online business documents was completed successfully and timely put into production with a further 100 from the following tranche ready for deployment. The Converter and Test Center were improved for higher automation which continues with regular updates to both tools. Commerzbank and comdirect have been provided with the solid base needed to extend into the future with exciting challenges upcoming with comdirect integration, Batch processing, Online Emails, SAP and MS Dynamics integration.
Providing full coverage for all types of communication, Papyrus high-performance solution navigates the intersection of online, high-volume processing and interactive communication, scaling for extreme throughput while remaining agile for personalized, one-to-one customer engagement.
The solution handles online document requests from bank branches and business applications, sending requests for single documents with a very high and consistent throughput of 3000 PDF documents per minute. Like the rest of the system, this capability is deployed to the cloud, running in OpenShift on Linux operating systems, utilizing containerization for elastic scaling.
A cloud-native architecture processes large-scale batches such as bank statements, annual reports or monthly account reports. By spinning up ephemeral containers for individual tasks and dissolving them immediately after execution, the system achieves a leap in operational agility, delivering a peak throughput of 1 million documents per hour.
A cloud-native solution scales for a varying number of parallel client requests with approx. 700–1000 concurrent users working with MS Dynamics or SAP. Papyrus links MS Dynamics and SAP data directly into the intuitive interactive letter-writing, while deeply integrating into SAP workflows for end-to-end service. As a result, the new interactive letter writing allows Commerzbank to blend the personal touch of human communication with the efficiency of automation, serving as a critical tool in the customer relationship cycle.
By aligning our structured implementation process with Commerzbank's specific needs and maintaining strict quality controls, we secured a seamless transition from initial scoping to successful deployment.
The project's success was built on the strong collaboration between Papyrus, Commerzbank, and comdirect. By prioritizing face-to-face collaboration over distant communication, we transitioned from diverse individual needs to a unified vision, serving as the foundation for the ambitious project execution.
The transition scales the bank's ability to handle complex operations while driving long-term efficiency through cloud-based infrastructure.
Due to the Papyrus performance Commerzbank processes high-volume communications 5x faster, drastically improving efficiency and turnaround times.
The introduction of the Business and Forms Designer, coupled with a streamlined, low-click interface, ensured that users receive immediate value from day one.
The Papyrus solution effectively transitioned Commerzbank and comdirect legacy document operations to the Cloud, while delivering a comprehensive shared communication platform designed to meet the Commerzbank's key strategic goals.
With specialized Converter and Test Center tools, both Assentis Doc Family (Smart Communications) and DOPiX (Quadient) documents have been migrated to the Papyrus platform in a semi-automated way with correction loops, test and defect management handled by integrated Papyrus Business Designer.
The new platform provides real time creation of documents such as PDF/A & UA, processing of mass documents >5.5 million documents in 5 hours as PDF/A & UA and in AFP format, SAP integration in workflows and support for processing complex business transactions with WYSIWYG front-end, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration with WYSIWYG front-end for individual customer communication.
In response to strategic direction of the bank, Papyrus introduced Native Cloud Operations, operating in the MS Azure cloud and containers with load balancing via OpenShift. The new platform is configured for 10 million documents / 60 million pages / day for batch and synchronous REST services for on-demand consumers service 24/7 (3,000 calls per minute) and interactive documents (SAP and MS Dynamics integrated) servicing more than 10000 Commerzbank and comdirect users.