Microsoft? AWS? Nein und nein. Deutsche Bank signs up with Google Cloud for its latest crack at digital transformation
- Reference: 1594123214
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/07/deutsche_bank_google/
- Source link:
The bank [1]had reportedly been courting Amazon, Microsoft and Google since February as it sought to "transform its IT architecture" or, more likely, put its ageing infrastructure out to pasture in favour of something more services based.
Google Cloud [2]has won the day and, once the multi-year contract has been signed (expected in a few months), will get cracking on a phased overhaul of the bank's current IT systems.
The Chocolate Factory has been actively slithering its tentacles into the financial services sector of late. In March, its Anthos and Apigee technologies [3]caught the attention of UK banking giant Lloyds.
Deutsche Bank has an eye on Google's smarts when it comes to data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The tech will be put to work on financial forecasting, risk analytics and securing client accounts. The bank said it also hoped to simplify the interactions between customers and employees.
There is certainly work to be done. Deutsche Bank has been on the receiving end of [4]regulatory scrutiny , although it did manage [5]to turn a profit (€132m before tax) in the last quarter (while shedding employees.)
Google was cock-a-hoop over the win, however, it is not the first tech outfit to have a crack at modernising Deutsche Bank's systems. The bank inked a deal with HP five years ago to [6]use the Helion private cloud .
A year later, a sad-faced HP engineer finally [7]pulled the plug on the concept .
Microsoft may have been left a tad deflated. It was trumpeting its new [8]Azure regions in Germany as recently as 2019, and said that Deutsche Bank was using its cloudy wares to develop "innovative financial products and services," while also keeping an eye on international and local regulatory requirements.
All three cloud rivals enjoy C5 ( [9]Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog ) attestation and Amazon was the first to claim the trophy at infrastructure level, back in 2016.
Deutsche Bank was keen to emphasise that it would continue to work with its existing technology partners, but with revenues year-on-year essentially flat, things need to be switched up.
"The partnership with Google Cloud will be an important driver of our strategic transformation," said Christian Sewing, CEO, Deutsche Bank. "It demonstrates our determination to invest in our technology as our future is strongly linked to successful digitization. It is as much a revenue story as it is about costs."
The financial value of the contract has yet to be confirmed. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/12/deutsche_bank_hopes_the_cloud_will_fix_its_creaky_old_it_systems/
[2] https://www.db.com/newsroom_news/2020/deutsche-bank-and-google-to-form-strategic-global-multi-year-partnership-to-drive-a-fundamental-transformation-o-en-11628.htm
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/10/lloyds_multicloud_google_microsoft/
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-11/deutsche-bank-s-1mdb-probe-adds-to-lengthy-list-of-legal-issues
[5] https://www.db.com/newsroom_news/2020/deutsche-bank-reports-profitable-quarter-driven-by-revenue-growth-in-core-businesses-strategic-transformation-on-en-11560.htm
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2015/02/24/hp_deutsche_bank/?_ga=1.206868947.1370797530.1375947281
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2015/10/21/hps_public_cloud_gets_eol_date/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/04/microsoft_germany_emerging_from_behind_deutsche_telekom_cloud/
[9] https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/BSI/Publications/CloudComputing/ComplianceControlsCatalogue-Cloud_Computing-C5
[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: DB is an omni-shambles
I think the same is true of any large financial institution. You have decades of legacy technology combined with oppressive bureaucracy, strict regulation, and obsessive penny-pinching. Whatever new technology strategy is arrived at is already behind the times and will remain burdened by the inability of the bureaucratic beancounter to grasp that all the red tape could largely be automated if only most every element of the infrastructure hadn't been built by the lowest bidder.
Re: DB is an omni-shambles
Original OP here.
DB was an order of magnitude worse than any other FS company I worked for..... There were many reasons that its Cost to Revenue ratio is among the worst in the industry
Its large chunk of "job's for life" german employee's
Anshu Jains 10 years of acquisition sprees that weren't integrated
The Boards inability to grasp that DB was a super tanker with a turning speed measured in decades, and firing any Cx who said so.
Their hokey cokey integration/de-integration of Postbank.
I literally could list them all day...
Weirdly enough some of the nicest people I ever met in banking there though....
Re: DB is an omni-shambles
I'd take it to the woodshed purely for being the only reputable financial institution stupid enough to fund Trump when no one else would touch him - and here we are (checks Trumps twitter feed for whatever shit he's spouting this morning - bangs head on wall)
Own Backup
Please tell me that even for a company as big as this bank that dumps its data onto a cloud, they ALSO make at least one copy of said data that is kept on the company's own premises and so unavailable to anybody outside the company .
Re: Own Backup
Sure, go ahead and believe that if it makes you feel better.
Re: Own Backup
So, you raise it in a dumb way (there's no reason on premises is inherently more/less secure than a cloud service provider, and there is oh-so-much-more to resilience than backups), but this is still a valid point.
In the run up to our current COVID shenanigans, the Public Accounts Select Committee published (in October of last year) an exceptional report into the technology risks facing our banking industry.
This started out as a bit of a retrospective into the many TITSUPs we've seen in the last couple of years, but in a remarkable display of parliamentary competence they identified a relatively new and growing category of "cloud provider concentration risk", wherein the reality that all critical provision can be now rooted back to two or three key providers at most. The committee came close to recommending that we apply FSI-type regulations to cloud providers as a result, but did not cross that rubicon.
That's why the big cloud vendors are spending megabucks to try and snaffle up these exclusive contracts now - they worry that the regulatory landscape in 2022+ will require banks to run in a multi-cloud/hybrid-cloud fashion to mitigate that concentration risk, or worse that they'll end up regulated themselves and lose the profit margin
DB is an omni-shambles
Its tech estate is so sprawling and complex the only solution to it to take the entire bank out the back of the barn and shoot it. Better people than Sewing have tried.
Source : 6 years working there.....