ČSOB's Automation Play: A Strategic Overhaul of Core Banking

BERLIN, Germany – November 26, 2025 – In a move that signals a significant strategic realignment, Československá obchodní banka (ČSOB), one of the Czech Republic's largest financial institutions, has selected German automation specialist Camunda to orchestrate its core banking processes. While technology partnerships are common, this decision represents more than a simple software procurement; it is a cornerstone of a multi-year, group-wide transformation aimed at fundamentally rebuilding the bank's operational DNA for a digital-first era.

For investors and market watchers, ČSOB’s investment is a decisive step away from the cumbersome, monolithic systems of the past toward a more agile, composable, and intelligent future. It reflects a deep understanding that long-term competitiveness in banking will not be won by products alone, but by the underlying efficiency, scalability, and resilience of the processes that deliver them.

Beyond Modernization: A Strategic Overhaul

This partnership is a pivotal element of ČSOB’s ambitious “UP!Core transformation program,” an initiative designed to rebuild its entire IT ecosystem. This is not merely about replacing legacy systems but about creating a modern, data-driven foundation to realize the bank’s vision of becoming a leading digital-first bank-insurance company. The selection of Camunda, made after a rigorous evaluation involving over 40 internal stakeholders, underscores a commitment to simplifying what has become an increasingly complex process landscape.

The challenges are familiar to any large, established bank: architectural duplicities, high infrastructure costs, and slow time-to-market for new products due to the constraints of custom-coded, inflexible systems. ČSOB aims to dismantle these barriers. As Tomas Sobotka, executive director at ČSOB, stated, “Camunda helps us simplify our complex process landscape and enables faster, more scalable operations that directly enhance customer experience. This transformation will strengthen our readiness for future innovation, while ensuring operational excellence across all channels.”

This move builds on a series of strategic technology investments by the bank, including the adoption of the Temenos T24 core banking system and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for CRM. The addition of Camunda’s orchestration layer is designed to be the connective tissue, unifying these systems and creating a single, coherent process flow for everything from customer onboarding to loan origination, whether a customer interacts through the ČSOB Smart mobile app or walks into a physical branch.

The Engine of Change: Agentic Automation with Guardrails

The technology at the heart of this deal is what Camunda calls 'enterprise agentic automation.' This goes beyond traditional business process management (BPM) by providing a framework to orchestrate complex workflows that involve a mix of human employees, legacy systems, microservices, and, critically, autonomous AI agents. For a highly regulated industry like finance, the concept of AI autonomy can be unsettling. Camunda's key differentiator is its ability to blend dynamic AI capabilities with deterministic, rules-based process models.

In practice, this creates 'guardrails' for AI. The platform uses the industry-standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) to define the overall process, ensuring that every step adheres to compliance and business logic. Within that controlled environment, AI agents can be deployed to handle specific tasks, make dynamic decisions, or personalize customer interactions. This hybrid approach allows banks like ČSOB to de-risk AI innovation, deploying it in mission-critical areas with the necessary governance and transparency.

By parameterizing products instead of relying on custom coding, the bank expects to dramatically accelerate its time-to-market. Furthermore, the platform's open, scalable architecture is designed to prepare ČSOB for a future of open banking, enabling seamless integrations with third-party fintechs and 'beyond-banking' services. Frederic Meier, senior vice president of sales at Camunda, noted the platform’s role in this shift: “Our platform empowers organizations like ČSOB to overcome complexity, accelerate digital transformation, and build more resilient operations.”

A Calculated Bet in a Competitive Arena

ČSOB’s choice of Camunda was made in a fiercely competitive market for automation and process management platforms, with major players like Appian, Pega, and ProcessMaker all vying for dominance in the financial services sector. The decision reflects a strategic bet on an open, developer-friendly orchestration engine over potentially more closed, all-in-one low-code suites. This choice prioritizes flexibility and control, allowing the bank to compose its best-of-breed technology stack rather than being locked into a single vendor's ecosystem.

The projected benefits—eliminating architectural duplicities, reducing infrastructure costs, and creating a unified process for all channels—are not merely theoretical. Case studies from other financial institutions that have implemented Camunda lend credibility to these expectations. Germany's Bank11, for instance, utilized the platform to standardize and automate a large portion of its core credit decisions, achieving high system stability and a better understanding of processes across departments. Similarly, Netcompany Banking Services reported significant reductions in development costs and a dramatic decrease in customer onboarding times after its implementation.

This external validation suggests that ČSOB's investment is well-positioned to deliver tangible returns, improving its cost-to-income ratio and freeing up resources to focus on innovation and customer value rather than system maintenance.

Setting the Pace in Central Europe's Digital Race

This partnership does not exist in a vacuum. It lands in the middle of a dynamic Czech banking sector, a regional leader in fintech adoption where mobile payments are exploding and nearly 90% of households have internet access. In this environment, standing still is not an option. The move by ČSOB, a subsidiary of the Belgian KBC Group, is poised to set a new benchmark for digital transformation among incumbent banks in Central and Eastern Europe.

As part of KBC Group's broader strategy to become a data-driven, digital-first entity across its core markets, the success of this initiative in the Czech Republic will be closely watched. A successful overhaul of ČSOB’s core processes could create a replicable blueprint for other banks in the region grappling with similar legacy challenges. For investors, this move signals a proactive, long-term strategy to build a more efficient, agile, and resilient organization capable of thriving amidst technological disruption and evolving customer expectations. It is a clear investment in the operational infrastructure that will underpin the bank's growth and profitability for the next decade.