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

efinancialcareers.co.uk

61–70 of 176 posts

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

#61
This is not surprising at all, and is not specific to Deutsche Bank or even banking in general.

This is a property of large, bloated legacy companies in any field. IT is still seen as a cost center and a secondary concern rather than the enabler of their business. As a result, pay/resources and "political capital" (for the lack of a better word) are allocated accordingly.

IT folks there aren't given the pay nor recognition they deserve, so no good talent joins or stays for long enough. Junior talent that joins ends up just learning from the mess and has no chance of actually becoming "good", so the problem continues.

Furthermore, the messy and unefficient IT systems benefit many people there, from lower-level menial positions whose jobs would be obsoleted by good IT to managerial positions who have a large list of reports to manage which gives them prestige and justifies their salary. Third-party suppliers also benefit as a bad IT system requires constant attention while a good system would require less attention (and a competent in-house team can attend do it, requiring no third-party involvement). Bad IT can also serve as cover - problems can be blamed on it instead of incompetence.

Fixing it incrementally from inside is politically impossible as people who rely on the status-quo will fight you on every step of the way. The only potential way is the organizational equivalent of a "full rewrite" - set up a subsidiary, give it unlimited money and task it with building a competing product. Operate it like a startup with the appropriate culture (especially regarding tech). Once the product is competitive, migrate customers onto it over time. This should be feasible at least for retail banking as UK fintech startups proved it's not actually impossible to create a bank from scratch. Rinse and repeat for every vertical of the business.

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

#62
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German speaking financial institutions are a special kind of IT hell. Perhaps it's a cultural love for rules in combination with compliance that evolves in a hellish bureaucracy, perhaps it's something in the local beer. We can only speculate but I've never worked in an environment as dysfunctional as the ones I've seen at big German companies. To give a few examples: - Running all services under a single Linux accou…

I worked for a Swiss firm and never noticed anything strange. Both founders are German speaking. Good guys. Although that was a small firm not a giant

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

#63
post #20

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, an…

Working on the buy side, I can tell you that GS is definitely not competent anymore, with all the cost cutting going on. Getting a bunch of CSV files on a SFTP server seems to be extremally challenging for them. Getting the numbers to match with what we're getting over email/on the website is impossible.

It's so bad that they're losing serious business on this despite being competitive on fees and service.

Bloomberg is great if you're big and bring a lot of money to the table. For any small/mid-size firm (think less than 5M ARR on Bloomberg licenses) the answer for even basic requests is often "we'll file an enhancement request" only for things to disappear and never get adjusted. To give an example, it's still not possible to get an hourly export of the trade history in CSV or XML on a SFTP server. There's workarounds but it's definitely not half-way competent.

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

#64

45 different operating systems?? I had no idea 45 different operating systems still existed that were functional

I had the same reaction, but I don’t think they mean “operating system” in the computer science sense. (E.g. Windows, Linux, etc.) I think they’re actually talking about 45 different systems they developed internally to run their business.

I think you’re correct - I worked there for about 5 years in the infrastructure engineering department. We had very rigorous processes around the underlying platform and keeping the operating systems and hardware up to date.

They’re talking about the “banking” operating systems.

Also note that Deutsche Bank (like many global financial institutions) is not really a single company, but more like 10 different companies all operating under one umbrella.

It’s all very well pointing at a company like Goldman and saying “look, they do IT well” when they don’t have the same range of commercial and consumer businesses as part of their company. If you’re just an investment bank, life is a bit simpler.

On a more general note I feel like in our industry there’s a tendency towards “perfection worship” where people think there’s some kind of immortal “perfect solution” that a company needs and anything less than that is terrible and must be chastised.

This is egoistical and forgets that IT and computing exists to enable companies and not the other way round. The world does not do computing for computing’s sake. Company change can be almost constant, changing systems to keep up is hard and expensive, being able to live with imperfection is critical to commercial success.

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

#65

As a firstborn American nerd with 100% German ancestors, it’s basically been frustrating my entire life to watch Germany whiff on basically any computer- or Internet-related technology. I can't even attribute it to the language barrier since they're all taught English at an early age. Perhaps it's that old German pride/hubris/NIH? “Stolz”… They’re a very smart people, not sure what gives. Perhaps a lack of respect fo…

I'm not saying you're completely wrong from a business perspective, but the open source hobbyist community on the other hand is pretty big here. Just the structures haven't kept up.

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

#66
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German speaking financial institutions are a special kind of IT hell. Perhaps it's a cultural love for rules in combination with compliance that evolves in a hellish bureaucracy, perhaps it's something in the local beer. We can only speculate but I've never worked in an environment as dysfunctional as the ones I've seen at big German companies. To give a few examples: - Running all services under a single Linux accou…

I worked for a Swiss firm and never noticed anything strange. Both founders are German speaking. Good guys. Although that was a small firm not a giant

I work for a small Swiss firm at the moment as well, the smaller firms are a lot better especially in Zurich where Google also has a big office (and Meta and Nvidia have smaller offices) so there's lots of cross pollination.

The firm in my post above is very much a Swiss firm though, you've probably heard of them, they're not a bank.

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

#67
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, an…

I almost wrote a non-US company. In general I must say that working for tech in European firms vs US firms is night and day, but that is another discussion :)

Willing to elaborate a bit on this?

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

#68
Perfectly sums up my experience dealing with the mess that is the IT of major German company in the automotive industry that I work for. Tons of mini-fiefdoms, each with its own strong-minded lord who has held that position for literal decades and who wants to expand their influence on other fiefdoms, an infrastructure where every single one of its components is incompatible and was never designed to work with anything else and that is held together with figurative duct tape and tons of depressed and overworked colleagues who would jump to another opportunity in a heartbeat but the money is actually good so we all just have to deal with it.

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

#69

This is 5 year old scuttlebutt and even what's publicly known about DB's systems has superseded most of the details here.

Cool, can you share some of the publicly available information then?

I interviewed at DB around 2018, and from that experience (what's the worst thing about working here, I asked my interviewer. The politics, she replied) plus that of all my friends who spent time there, this article rings pretty true.

But I'd love to get some more up to date info, so would be happy if you could share.

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

#70
post #16

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…

DB was running LotusNotes instead of Outlook well into the 2010s.

This feels like crap-Investment-Bank poker.

I'll raise you a company-wide ticketing system written in COBOL, running on an IBM mainframe.

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