“With our technology strategy launched in 2019, we want to strengthen engineering and IT architectural excellence in Deutsche Bank, and we need to have these capabilities in-house,” Bernd Leukert, its chief technology, data and innovation officer, told ET on a recent visit to India.
In the last two years, the bank has doubled its headcount in India to 5,000, primarily in tech, but also in other roles. It will add another 2,500 people this year to “cater to growth and backfill roles”, he said.
India is currently home to a third of its total tech workforce.
The decision to in-source tech development and increase tech hiring came at a time when the rest of the bank was undergoing job cuts and rationalisation.
India, said Leukart, was the obvious place to increase its presence given the quality of technology and engineering skills available here. “We decided to grow into technology centres, and India is now our biggest one. It isn’t necessarily about gaining cost benefits, but rather the technology talent that we see in India,” he said.
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The India technology centre now provides services across a whole spectrum of business areas, and is leading development in areas like cloud, machine learning, artificial intelligence and remote work.
This change in focus has been driven by a larger shift in the market, with the bank’s customers adopting technology at a faster pace. “As our customers are changing their business models, we need to change as well to support them in their transformation … and technology is the enabler for that,” he said.
“The change starts with how we as a bank engage with customers,” said Leukert. “We have redefined it and want to leverage modern technology to incorporate our financial services into the digitalised business models of our customers,” he said.
In 2020, Deutsche Bank announced a partnership with Google to co-innovate on new products and services and adopt a new cloud-adoption strategy.
The long-term focus, said Leukart, would be to strengthen the internal technology talent. Over time, it intends to have 70% of its technology workforce comprise internal employees, and 30% from vendors and partners. At present, this is split about equally.
