COVID-19: Cloud will be the way forward with agile as a methodology at Deutsche Bank

Dilipkumar Khandelwal took the reins as MD at Deutsche Bank in the beginning of December, 2019. Little did he know that his strategy of criss crossing the various technology development centres to get an overview of the operations and meeting people would come in handy to manage the ‘reset’ that were to come during COVID-19. Of course, Dilipkumar was with SAP Labs for nearly nineteen years and that experience was always a leverage.

Dilip’s first focus was to predominantly understand how people remain productive, how they work, handle backlogs, etc. Apart from Germany and the UK, he travelled the four major technology development centres, in Bengaluru, Russia, USA and Romania (Bucharest).

The technology Infrastructure preparedness of the bank to handle the operationalisation of the massive WFH activation for over eighty thousand employees was seamless, although with certain hiccups. This proved certain naysayers wrong who had an impression that the bank was operating on a legacy infrastructure. The technology team of the German headquartered Bank has invested heavily in modernising the IT infrastructure. Dilipkumar Khandelwal, Managing Director and Global Head of Technology Centres, Deutsche Bank speaks with EC’s Abhishek Raval on how the bank has been able to weather the COVID-19 crises and what lies ahead.

Edited Excerpts

As soon as the coronavirus crises hit, what was your strategy to continue to facilitate the employees and serve the customers?
The technology team at Deutsche Bank has worked hard in the last couple of years in building a robust digital infrastructure. We are heavily invested into our IT infrastructure. It enabled the eighty thousand employees and the vendors / partners to work flawlessly. In terms of downtime, it was fifty percent lower in the Q1 of 20-21 than the best quarter of the last FY. It was far better than what the infrastructure could have handled. This was inspite of the surge in the use of conferencing solutions by the different stakeholders – the peer to peer voice usage increased by four hundred percent; video by five hundred percent. The usage of skype also increased exponentially.

We made quick decisions and upgraded our infrastructure so that people can work from home effectively. Apart from strengthening of the IT backbone, this was made possible because of fast-tracking the implementation of the collaboration tool and also introducing e-signatures for various departments to sign the documents used in the collaboration tools.

Which specific initiatives were taken to enhance the IT backbone?
Deutsche Bank has started investing in Technology infrastructure and simplification of Technology landscape for the last 2-3 years. Cloud technology provides huge opportunities in terms of flexibility, scalability and developer productivity. However, you cannot just lift and shift existing applications and start deploying them on cloud. You have to apply common standards to technology environments and modernize applications architecture before moving onto cloud and this standardization work has started a couple of years back which has built the foundation for our cloud journey.

In February – March 2020, we started discussions with major cloud service providers to explore options for entering into a cooperation. To match our demands on how the cloud can support emerging technologies. This will greatly help as our developers will be able to focus on application development instead of dealing with the infrastructure.

For work from home enablement for employees – across functions, how have you been able to manage to provide a secure environment?
The IT infrastructure enabled not only the employees but also the clients, salespeople and traders alike.

The IT infrastructure has been set up in such a fashion that the employees, especially from the technology and operations team, just need a laptop and they can securely login to the network. In the initial period, few employees didn’t have laptops, consistent internet connectivity, etc. It was made sure these important ingredients of the physical infrastructure for the employees were made available.

For clients – our FX platform capability are helping corporate facing challenges due to pandemic to keep the lights on. Mobile technology has given Deutsche Bank an advantage as it caters to client needs effectively.  Our mobile banking application made life easy for retail clients in conducting their daily business. The use of this app has increased significantly in March 2020 with a new all-time-high of 1.8mn log-ins on a single day.

The salespeople and the traders were also provided with the necessary tools and technologies to operate from home. Our technology team was able to build a COVID-19 helpdesk-bot in under three weeks. The chatbot provides clients with answers to corona-related questions on the Corporate Bank public website in Germany.

When you are operating in multiple time-zones, there are obvious challenges with respect to information security and privacy. How do you handle those?
As a global organisation, we have a very strong local setup in India and respective locations in USA, Russia and Romania to make sure we are meeting the government and regulatory requirements.

The rule adherence is tracked on a daily basis with the help of a dedicated platform. The bank keeps a razor sharp focus on customer experience and Information security.We have also set up a central coordination department that regularly keeps a tab on the happenings in each of the countries we operate in and provides country specific communication. For a global organisation, this is important as all countries are delaying with corona crisis differently. This helps keep the employees engaged and up-to-date.

Given the new normal, what’s the way forward?
Companies will have to be flexible with people in the way they want to operate and technology is going to be a great enabler. We still don’t know what the world will be like, post COVID-19 but it will certainly not be like how it used to be.

At Deutsche Bank, in the past few years, we have invested in our technology backbone and cloud will be the way forward – with agile as the methodology. The bank is adopting agile as a whole, not only within technology teams, but businesses are also coming along to make the whole bank agile so that we can speed up decision making. Agile in conventional terms applies to employees working from one location but now, it will have to be redefined and adjusted for the work from home environment.

I usually instruct companies I mentor with a three-step process – plan, prioritise and execute. Do a regular review of the plans and see what’s working and accordingly prioritise and then execute. And also, keep the employees first as they are the most important assets.