
DB is an omni-shambles
Its tech estate is so sprawling and complex the only solution to it to take the entire bank out the back of the barn and shoot it. Better people than Sewing have tried.
Source : 6 years working there.....
Deutsche Bank has snubbed the world's two biggest purveyors of clouds to name Google Cloud in a deal that the German giant said "is as much a revenue story as it is about costs". The bank had reportedly been courting Amazon, Microsoft and Google since February as it sought to "transform its IT architecture" or, more likely, …
I think the same is true of any large financial institution. You have decades of legacy technology combined with oppressive bureaucracy, strict regulation, and obsessive penny-pinching. Whatever new technology strategy is arrived at is already behind the times and will remain burdened by the inability of the bureaucratic beancounter to grasp that all the red tape could largely be automated if only most every element of the infrastructure hadn't been built by the lowest bidder.
Original OP here.
DB was an order of magnitude worse than any other FS company I worked for..... There were many reasons that its Cost to Revenue ratio is among the worst in the industry
Its large chunk of "job's for life" german employee's
Anshu Jains 10 years of acquisition sprees that weren't integrated
The Boards inability to grasp that DB was a super tanker with a turning speed measured in decades, and firing any Cx who said so.
Their hokey cokey integration/de-integration of Postbank.
I literally could list them all day...
Weirdly enough some of the nicest people I ever met in banking there though....
So, you raise it in a dumb way (there's no reason on premises is inherently more/less secure than a cloud service provider, and there is oh-so-much-more to resilience than backups), but this is still a valid point.
In the run up to our current COVID shenanigans, the Public Accounts Select Committee published (in October of last year) an exceptional report into the technology risks facing our banking industry.
This started out as a bit of a retrospective into the many TITSUPs we've seen in the last couple of years, but in a remarkable display of parliamentary competence they identified a relatively new and growing category of "cloud provider concentration risk", wherein the reality that all critical provision can be now rooted back to two or three key providers at most. The committee came close to recommending that we apply FSI-type regulations to cloud providers as a result, but did not cross that rubicon.
That's why the big cloud vendors are spending megabucks to try and snaffle up these exclusive contracts now - they worry that the regulatory landscape in 2022+ will require banks to run in a multi-cloud/hybrid-cloud fashion to mitigate that concentration risk, or worse that they'll end up regulated themselves and lose the profit margin
It's a good idea to point out that Deutsche Bank is not the Bank of England of Germany as that idea seems to pop up every now and then. I suppose a name like Bank of America could lead to similar miss understandings too.
The bank is known for money laundering and apparently popular with the Russian oligarchy and quoting the Wikipedia we find this:
"Deutsche Bank is widely recognized as being the largest creditor to real-estate-mogul-turned-politician Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States, holding more than US$360 million in outstanding loans to the candidate in the months prior to his 2016 election. As of December 2017 Deutsche Bank's role in, and possible relevance to, Trump and Russian parties cooperating to elect him was reportedly under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.[115] As of March 2019, Deutsche Bank's relationship with Trump was reportedly also under investigation by two U.S. congressional committees and by the New York attorney general".
Among notable employees we find Sajid Javid, (2007–2009).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bank