Sparkasse Hannover: An NCR Case Study

The customer

With assets of €12.6 billion and 2,400 staff, Sparkasse Hannover is the biggest bank in the state of Lower Saxony. Its customer base is largely regional and is made up of both personal and corporate business. The bank, which is Germany’s sixth largest of its type, is a product of the 2003 merger between Kreissparkasse Hannover and Stadtsparkasse Hannover. Today, it has 100 branches and more than 50 customer advice centers in the Hanover area. Customers enjoy a comprehensive self-service offer, with more than 600 self-service systems at their disposal. More than 100 of these also allow customers to make cash deposits. With its expansive self-service infrastructure, Sparkasse Hannover is linked to Finanz Informatik (formerly Finanz IT; a German IT service provider for financial institutions) and the systems house and data processing center of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe (a collective organization made up of several German savings banks).

The challenge

In 2004, Sparkasse Hannover decided to convert all its branches to financial services branches (Finanzdienstleistungsfilialen or FDL for short). Among other things, this model relieves bank staff of straightforward but often time consuming transactional duties, allowing them to spend more time on sales and marketing tasks and advising customers.

One way of supporting this process was to transfer a range of services from the bank counter to the self-service channel. Another objective was to simplify the branch cash management process and unify administration to reduce costs. Sparkasse Hannover reviewed all relevant counter processes and self-service systems, including replenishing ATMs using cash transportation companies. The detailed analysis focused particularly on the question of costs. As a result of the analysis, Sparkasse Hannover decided to remove night safes at 24 of it’s locations. Night safes are labor-intensive, and this, coupled with the associated high costs, compared unfavorably with the relatively little use that customers made of them.

As a result, it was decided that future cash withdrawals and deposits should be supported by a more efficient and cost-effective self-service channel.