Deutsche Bank Turns Attention to Production Engineering

Deutsche Bank (DB) is bringing its operations and production teams closer together to further drive automation within the bank. The aim is to provide staff with new tools and relevant training to enable them to automate processes that don’t need manual execution with more independence, Stuart Gurr, group CIO for Asia-Pacific, tells WatersTechnology.

“So what we’re doing as a bank is investing a lot of focus around what we call production engineering,” he says, which supports the infrastructure, development, and technology teams.  

Long before the coronavirus pandemic, DB had been working to iron out unnecessary manual processes across the bank. Gurr says that those previous automation efforts have helped the bank to more easily enact its business continuity plan (BCP) after the Covid-19 outbreak forced large portions of the global workforce to work remotely at the same time. Additionally, the pandemic has made clear that further automation will be beneficial.

“As an example, we’ve enabled 50,000 people globally with videoconferencing capabilities on our internal platform in just two weeks, which we achieved at the end of February. Along with other areas—such as self-service provisioning [where an individual doesn’t have to interact with another human to solve an issue] and soft-tokens [which is two-factor authentication for accessing services]—if done manually, none of these could have been delivered at the scale required,” says Gurr. 

Towards the more “cognitive end” of the automation spectrum, DB is using intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) in different parts of the bank. As an example, Gurr points to DB’s IT service desk and portal, which provides automated capabilities around self-provisioning of products, but also employs an IVAs to help direct traffic.  

He says this helps staff understand what products are available and how they can be provisioned on the back of requests.

“This includes advice on how to get set up working from home, plus the more classic kind of help desk requirements,” he says. “What we found was that the services desk came under a lot of pressure—as you would expect—over the last two to three months. And having that automation and artificial intelligence capability has helped tremendously. We had a nice inflection point earlier this year where this particular IVA started resolving more contact requests than it passed on to a human agent.” 

Everyone’s an Engineer

Gurr says the larger goal is to find ways to better align the operations and software development teams. Ops is often the first to see on-the-ground challenges and, thus, will better understand the exact processes that can be automated, and which still require manual input. 

“For example, we [want to] bring these kinds of lower-end automation requirements into that structure, these production engineers into agile teams, and ensure that we get those automation requirements added into the backlog and treated as part of the program of work within the business,” Gurr says. 

While the operation and production teams do already work together, this move formalizes the feedback loop among the two. It allows them to further enhance the efficiency and capability of DB’s internal services. 

DB continues to drive agile methodologies across the bank and wants to build an engineering mentality across technology in the bank.

“This means cross-training staff where necessary to develop these engineering capabilities, and building it into objectives as part of a people proposition,” he says.