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Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

efinancialcareers.co.uk

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Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#11

Post by bilekas »

objclxt wrote: post #9
bilekas wrote: post #3

Deutsche Bank has made 5 acquisitions Norisbank 1954, Bonn Carron Energy 2004, Cardiff Better Payment 2014, Berlin United Financial Group 1981, Garden City Quantiguous 2014, Mumbai Given all of these needing to integrate together to some degree, and the bureaucracy of banks in general, add that to their resistence to change / improve something related to the tech if it still works, none of this surprises me. You see…

> I have just seen that she has passed away last year at 35 years old from cancer. You’ve misread the article, she was diagnosed with cancer on 2003 aged 35, and died this year aged 55.

You're absolutely right! I'll fix that up so! Thanks

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#12

Post by kwant_kiddo »

Worked in a similar organisation also. The culture in european banks is even more dull than I expected before working there.

The view on technology and infrastructure is very primitive... as you can also read from just the header "IT division". I initially thought that they were competent but greedy turns out the banks are really just greedy, naive and sometimes... plain stupid.

I don't know if it's unique to Europe, but I am never working for a non tech-first company again.

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#13

Post by hardlianotion »

Multiplicity of systems was a feature of nearly all banks before 2008 and was a contributing factor to some of the inability to perceive and react to risk. After 2008, and forced to by regulators, most banks focussed a lot of resources and attention to consolidate and give themselves a strategic view. Deutsche seems to have found this task far too difficult.

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#15

Post by tragomaskhalos »

Don't think this is atypical of many organisations that have grown their IT over a long period. When I did some work for Network Rail (here in the UK) there were some absolutely hair-raising diagrams of umpteen systems all with lines between them, doubtless many going back to BR days.

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#16

Post by DrBazza »

Even though this is from 2018, it was and still is completely applicable to every other investment bank out there.

Investment banking organizational structures are set up such that bureaucracy encourages 'silos' where teams can deliver quicker if they don't depend on other teams, and performance related pay dominates the managers (managing directors) thinking.

Having worked at Megabank, it ran at least one system on SunOS (not Solaris), well into the late 2010s. It had Windows XP, long after end-of-life.

Nothing about that story is peculiar to DB.

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#17

Post by raverbashing »

jiggawatts wrote: post #7
bilekas wrote: post #3

Deutsche Bank has made 5 acquisitions Norisbank 1954, Bonn Carron Energy 2004, Cardiff Better Payment 2014, Berlin United Financial Group 1981, Garden City Quantiguous 2014, Mumbai Given all of these needing to integrate together to some degree, and the bureaucracy of banks in general, add that to their resistence to change / improve something related to the tech if it still works, none of this surprises me. You see…

My current consulting gig is at a government "superdepartment" that was formed by mashing together a few dozen small agencies that were previously already combined into large agencies. Their IT was as diverse as it gets, and then they were told to move into one building and "make it work". It's as messy and as broken as you imagine it is.

I wonder if maybe AI could help with such an ungrateful job.

Yes because one division is sending the data in XML and a 3 letter county code and values in thousands of monetary unit and another system does things in a completely different way

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#18

Post by Roark66 »

I've worked as a contractor in a large bank leading a project to migrate from a plethora of backup systems into one newly built system. 30% of my time was spent on filling "paperwork". Implementation plans, risk assessments, fail back plans and so on. There was a lot of this, but people in general had positive attitude (no big difference between contractors and employees) so I think of the time as an interesting experience rather than a negative. We too had around 30 OSes to deal with, but in itself it wasn't a problem.

I suspect the problem in DB is not it's aging, disjointed IT infrastructure, but the culture.

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#19

Post by Roark66 »

raverbashing wrote: post #17
jiggawatts wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current consulting gig is at a government "superdepartment" that was formed by mashing together a few dozen small agencies that were previously already combined into large agencies. Their IT was as diverse as it gets, and then they were told to move into one building and "make it work". It's as messy and as broken as you imagine it is.

I wonder if maybe AI could help with such an ungrateful job. Yes because one division is sending the data in XML and a 3 letter county code and values in thousands of monetary unit and another system does things in a completely different way

>I wonder if maybe AI could help with such an ungrateful job.

It's not necessarily ungrateful. It can even be interesting, but it all depends how everyone approaches it and the most important thing ever is: realistic timeliness and outcomes.

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#20

Post by eru »

kwant_kiddo wrote: post #12

Worked in a similar organisation also. The culture in european banks is even more dull than I expected before working there. The view on technology and infrastructure is very primitive... as you can also read from just the header "IT division". I initially thought that they were competent but greedy turns out the banks are really just greedy, naive and sometimes... plain stupid. I don't know if it's unique to Europe,…

> The culture in european banks is even more dull than I expected before working there.

> I don't know if it's unique to Europe, but I am never working for a non tech-first company again.

For what it's worth, Goldman Sachs is reasonably competent in tech, and used to be even more so (at least in relative terms).

Bloomberg is about half-way between the banks and the more competent tech companies.

(I worked at both, and a few other financial companies and also at Google, Facebook etc.)

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