Gently coaxing Commerzbank to open its doors

Jörg Brock, Commerzbank’s head of product development, tells Roxane McMeeken about the arduous task of selling open architecture to the bank.
Selling products manufactured by your rivals is corporate suicide. If you have the capacity to create a wide range of investment funds in-house, why on earth would you sell the competition’s products simultaneously?”
This was the argument Jörg Brock came up against when he began advocating the introduction of so-called “open architecture” at Commerzbank in 2001. As head of product development for private clients at the German bank, he believes offering customers access to external funds best serves the interests of the entire firm – both the product sales division and the product manufacturing centre.