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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)

#21

Post by raverbashing »

Roark66 wrote: post #19
raverbashing wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but it's hard not to feel it's ungrateful when you see the 5th "creative" way of doing something which is pretty much like running with a spare tire and thinking it's all good

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

#22

Post by dsr_ »

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

No, because the field that in one system is called "cash" is called "settled" in another; system A uses BCD for money, system B uses 32 bit unsigned ints reckoned in millicents, and system C uses a cash object which can define original currency, calculated currency value, guaranteed conversion preference, contract reference number, and precision.

Understanding semantics is required, not just form.

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

#23

Post by danielovichdk »

I have so many good stories from developing software inside banking.

Every management team I have ever worked for in banking - I have worked 4 stints in 4 different banks as a contractor - has been so old school that its been impossible to apply any up to date constructs from the professional software world.

I once had a manager who had been with the bank for 40 years. He simply drawed 3 boxes on a board, drawed a few lines between them and asked "how long will this take ?"

Hmm...what is in the first box?

Old school, grey and stale. That's banking for you in Europe at least.

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

#24

Post by deadbunny »

Roark66 wrote: post #18

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 expe…

I did a short stint at BP and it was the same. The final straw for me was the 8 week process to get an internally signed TLS cert which required signoffs by like 6 VPs across every region (US, EMEA, etc.).

It paid well but fuck that noise.

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

#25

Post by ant6n »

ahartmetz wrote: post #8

They acquired Postbank (where I have an account) some years ago. Postbank had a reputation for good IT. Now they are consolidating their online banking system... Of course, on the bad system of Deutsche Bank. It's a huge mess. I need to log into two different systems for credit card and bank account things. They mailed me account statements for the timeframe of one day once and for a few days another time. I never ge…

Uh oh, I was considering opening an account with them… actually they couldnt in July, because of their IT transition. Maybe I‘ll pick a different one. Any recommendations for a good Business Account in Germany?

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

#26

Post by baz00 »

danielovichdk wrote: post #23

I have so many good stories from developing software inside banking. Every management team I have ever worked for in banking - I have worked 4 stints in 4 different banks as a contractor - has been so old school that its been impossible to apply any up to date constructs from the professional software world. I once had a manager who had been with the bank for 40 years. He simply drawed 3 boxes on a board, drawed a fe…

I have to run integrations with things those sort of people designed. We get EDI streams and error codes straight from some COBOL thing from the 70s which has been carefully ported through to whatever crap they're running today verbatim.

Recently there was an issue where a field overflowed which broke literally everything. Then they added a zero to the start as part of the specification which broke it even more because half the companies on the planet were treating it as a string and not a number.

If there's anything I've ever learned about working in the financial sector it is that the only thing that is protecting you is the legal framework around it, not the banks or financial companies which are universally a fucking shit show.

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

#27

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #15

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.

This makes me excited for what current microservices architecture systems will look like in fifty years!

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

#29

Post by thilog »

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…

One major acquisition that is missing from your list was the aquisition of Postbank in 2018.

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

#30

Post by sharas- »

banks are particularly low imagination, high control places. The "resources" they hire are particularly generic, safe and fungible/expendable. By definition, such "resources" are playing with themselves, creating "frameworks" and "platforms". The low imagination management of banks cannot understand that they got "resources" they filtered for and results accordingly. https://bitslap.it/blog/posts/playground-it.html
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