When I joined Deutsche Bank in 2019, we decided to take an ambitious step into the public cloud to transform our technology environment. This was a bold move at the time and we needed a partner who could support this new direction. Google Cloud’s management within data and AI made them the right choice for us.
This jump paid off. We have moved about 260 applications to Google Cloud, including business-critical, which enabled us to quickly implement generative AI technologies.
Here’s a look at how we worked with Google Cloud to do this.
Migrates our systems to Google Cloud
We started with the basic elements. Because we are in a very regulated industry, we implemented strong controls to ensure secure transfer of our applications and data to the public cloud. To minimize the risk, we first migrated non-critical applications. This allowed us to gain experience and confidence with cloud technology. Then we started building new applications naturally in the cloud, as well as our Frontier Finance platform, which is directly connected to our business customers’ environment to enable invoices and payments.
We also recognize that different applications have different needs. For our Autobahn, for example, trading platform, a Hybrid Cloud solution turned out to be the best fit, which allows us to meet the unique requirements of this business.
Then the real test came: Migrated one of our core financing platforms – SAP S4/HANA – to Google Cloud. This was one of the most complex migrations in economic history involving the relocation of 17 economic reporting systems, including the bank’s strategic general book, planning and prognosis systems, from our local infrastructure to the public cloud.
The effort was worth it. We have seen improvements in data processing up to 50%and a reduced recovery time by a factor of 16-20. Our strategic risk management system also runs on Google Cloud using high -cluster calculation and advanced data analysis
Implementation of AI tools and investment in our employees
The cloud allows us to adapt and scale our technology easily so that we can respond to market fluctuations and customer needs at an unprecedented speed. We have removed bottlenecks from our processes so we can insert new products faster. And decisively, the cloud gives the huge computing power needed to exploit artificial intelligence.
Google Cloud also helps us invest in the people who work in our company and ensure that we have the talent to lead in the digital age. We created the Cloud Engineer program in the bank, which helped us train more than 6,000 employees in Sky and AI skills. We work side by side with Google Cloud to run hackathons and application migration sprints.
To bring generative AI to our company
Our Google Cloud Partnership gives us access to the Vertex AI platform and powerful large language models such as Gemini. We can also probably experiment with new Gemini models before their public release.
Here are a few examples of how we already use generative AI:
- Processing of documents: We use a generative AI solution to automate the processing of thousands of documents daily, achieve 97% accuracy and reduce handling time by 40%. This automatically includes extracting information from customer orders and legal documents.
- Offers employees AI assistants: Our new digital assistant helps Deutsche Bank’s employees who are currently in research and origin and advice, curate accurate and consistent content, reducing the manual efforts involved in the preparation of reports, analysis and other critical business results. It has the potential to expand all over the bank.
- Development of New Software: Generative AI helps our developers, help them write code faster, find errors more effectively and improve documentation.
We will continue to use our partnership to find new ways to bring generative AI to our products and to our employees. We hope through our work, we also set new standards for the entire industry.