Deutsche Bank First Looks to Interop, Chatbot Projects After Partnering with Google

Deutsche Bank and Google Cloud announced a strategic partnership in July, aiming “to redefine how the bank develops and offers its financial services”. Since then, Deutsche has started to identify areas of its business that present opportunities for co-creation between the two companies on chatbots, natural language processing (NLP), and interoperability initiatives.

Chris Bezuidenhout, chief information officer for corporate and investment banking in Asia-Pacific and emerging markets at Deutsche Bank, tells WatersTechnology that Deutsche approaches co-creating with Google in terms of enhancing existing capabilities and creating new solutions.

Some of the areas where Google’s expertise might help could be as “basic” as the chatbots the bank has rolled out; introducing NLP features into Deutsche’s Debbie bot, for instance. Debbie is a chatbot designed to provide client trade status information and facilitate foreign exchange workflows. 

Bezuidenhout says there’s an ongoing, heavy focus on cross-education and engagement sessions between the companies. 

“The second dimension that we are utilizing is running workshops with our product teams—industry or product-specific specialists on Deutsche Bank’s side, and challenging the way we look at the future of business and [the] role technology will play in enabling clients,” he says. 

Deutsche and Google Cloud joined forces this summer, signing a multi-year partnership to accelerate the bank’s cloud transition and build on the engineering capabilities of both companies. According the announcement issued in July, other potential use cases include helping treasury clients with day-to-day tasks such as cash flow forecasting, improved risk analytics, and advanced security solutions to protect clients’ accounts. 

Another important project, Bezuidenhout says, will be getting the bank to a position where interoperability is a core tenet of the way it designs solutions. 

“We see opportunity in terms of challenging our design thinking more specifically, and working with Google to think about enabling more advanced interoperability as a theme,” he says, particularly in the context of advanced analytics, the volume and scale of transactions that the bank processes, how it utilizes the services on the cloud, and strengthening its engineering acumen. “It will help us to ensure that we can have better sharing of the data flow of information across our front-to-back application stack.” 

Currently, when Deutsche Bank builds out services, from a data perspective, they are wrapped into a monolithic platform. A logical, eventual step will be creating a central function to enable data sharing instead of having siloed, separate databases. Bezuidenhout says that will make it easier for the bank to operate between different use cases or business areas. 

With Google’s help, the bank will also look to revitalize its tooling and infrastructure that supports DevOps and other operational processes. To Bezuidenhout, that means ensuring, from a development perspective, Deutsche can automate more of its core infrastructure tooling than it currently does.

While the partnership means that Google will be the bank’s primary infrastructure cloud provider, it doesn’t preclude the bank from using its other existing cloud service providers in other instances. Last year, the bank integrated CloudMargin’s cloud-based offering for collateral and margin management requirements. 

It also uses cloud-based solutions like Salesforce for customer relationship management and WorkDay for human resources, which Bezuidenhout says form part of the bank’s core tech landscape. 

“The reality is, as an organization, there will be multiple solutions—and you can call them cloud-based or for cloud providers to a degree—that we will leverage. But ultimately, the nature of the partnership of Google will really be focused on the core infrastructure, shared services, and business applications,” he adds.