Deutsche Bank modernises credit risk technology
>€10m over three years
By decommissioning legacy systems, coupled with improved system performance, productivity and stability
Risk reduction
By transformational change to the bank’s regulatory posture – i.e., by outperforming regulations around data management, storage, manual processing.
Optimised decision-making
With a single source of truth (data) and improved data quality, decision-making is optimised across the organisation.
Background
A department of about 1,000 employees, Deutsche Bank’s credit risk function supports the decision-making of thousands of employees, in multiple departments, across various regions. Yet the underlying technology on which the function relied was beginning to show its age.
Challenge
The existing credit risk system comprised more than ten standalone applications. This was leading to duplication of effort, user dissatisfaction, and slow service delivery. The system’s complexity also meant that significant effort was required to keep pace with technical developments across the organisation.
By relying on this outdated and complex system, the bank was vulnerable to clear risks. For example:
- The existing system ingested data from >200 sources and stored it in >100 separate systems. This approach exposed Deutsche Bank to system errors and data inaccuracies.
- Employees in the credit risk function had become accustomed to operating with 100s of instances of manual checking and reporting. While this allowed users to quickly generate reports to inform decision-making, this approach lacked transparency and is prone to error.
Taken together, these issues characterised a system that was struggling to align with existing regulations and was unfit to adapt to even more stringent regulations arriving in 2025.
The need for change was clear, and there was no time to waste in selecting a trusted and experienced partner that could deliver. With its unrivalled financial technology expertise, and decades of experience in delivering major strategic projects for financial institutions globally, GFT was perfectly placed to tackle the challenge at hand.
Engagement
>100 GFT engineers have worked with Deutsche Bank over several years to create the new credit risk system and to optimise processes and project management. The new system now stands as a unified, globally integrated platform, marking a step forward from the previous fragmented applications. Key project elements included:
“The programme delivered against our core banking commitments and achieved a significant reduction of costs. The technical and functional knowledge GFT provided, based on multiple years of business-related experience was of paramount importance in our success and this is why we continue to engage with them.”
Benefit
GFT’s experts have outperformed the customer’s expectations and have made long-lasting impacts at the application and business level. These include:
- Data: GFT helped to consolidate >200 sources of data (stored in >100 systems) into a single source of truth. This new data store supplies data to all credit risk applications in minutes. Most importantly, data quality has improved, yielding major enhancements in decision-making, traceability, and risk reduction. For instance, Deutsche Bank has transformed its data management, storage, and processing capability, and is therefore outperforming regulations, including Dodd-Frank & EMIR, BCBS 239, Basel III, CCAR, ICAAP.
- Agility: A microservices architecture paired with a highly optimised, modular code base provides redundancy and massively improves compute capacity. This will allow the system to scale easily as the demands of the function increase over time – something which would have been impossible using the previous system.
- Efficiency: Process automation has enabled Deutsche Bank to remove numerous instances of manually checking within the function. Critically, Risk Manager productivity has improved by 25%, and in one instance, report-generation time fell by 21 days!
Staying ahead of regulations
The new credit risk system has revolutionised Deutsche Bank’s ability to monitor, manage, and mitigate credit risk across the organisation. In fact, the bank has not only rocketed ahead of existing financial regulations, but it is also perfectly positioned to meet new regulations that are expected to arrive in 2025. This is thanks in part to the agility and resilience conferred by Deutsche Bank’s new internal cloud and microservices architecture.
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Success story
Deutsche Bank modernises credit risk technology and delivers over €10m in savings
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