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Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

by Cwizard on 7/23/23, 10:01 AM with 166 comments

• by arianvanp on 7/23/23, 12:03 PM

  Yeh you notice it as a customer.

  I can't choose a password for my account; instead they assigned me a 6-digit PIN (Not kidding. A PIN).

  When I registered my account at a local branch I gave them my dutch phone number. Their website's transaction page wouldn't load due to a JavaScript parsing error over the dutch phone number format. I called customer support and they basically reacted as if water was burning. They would promise to get back to me. 3 weeks later I still couldn't access my online bank account's transaction page. I ended up eventually manually editing the HTML in inspector in order to be able to navigate to the page where I could update my phone number to a German one and I never heard back from support.

  I tried opening a depot account for trading stocks. It just says "Internal server error. your account id is incompatible. Please open an additional account with Deutsche Bank". I then tried this; had to go to KYC all over again; but I can't because I can't register two accounts on the 2FA app that is mandatory to have on my phone. Customer support adviced to get a second phone (??).

  and I'm just a normal customer. It's impossible to bank with this bank. Every time I have to interact with them it feels like i'm in some weird fever dream.

• by Nextgrid on 7/23/23, 1:31 PM

  This is not surprising at all, and is not specific to Deutsche Bank or even banking in general.

  This is a property of large, bloated legacy companies in any field. IT is still seen as a cost center and a secondary concern rather than the enabler of their business. As a result, pay/resources and "political capital" (for the lack of a better word) are allocated accordingly.

  IT folks there aren't given the pay nor recognition they deserve, so no good talent joins or stays for long enough. Junior talent that joins ends up just learning from the mess and has no chance of actually becoming "good", so the problem continues.

  Furthermore, the messy and unefficient IT systems benefit many people there, from lower-level menial positions whose jobs would be obsoleted by good IT to managerial positions who have a large list of reports to manage which gives them prestige and justifies their salary. Third-party suppliers also benefit as a bad IT system requires constant attention while a good system would require less attention (and a competent in-house team can attend do it, requiring no third-party involvement). Bad IT can also serve as cover - problems can be blamed on it instead of incompetence.

  Fixing it incrementally from inside is politically impossible as people who rely on the status-quo will fight you on every step of the way. The only potential way is the organizational equivalent of a "full rewrite" - set up a subsidiary, give it unlimited money and task it with building a competing product. Operate it like a startup with the appropriate culture (especially regarding tech). Once the product is competitive, migrate customers onto it over time. This should be feasible at least for retail banking as UK fintech startups proved it's not actually impossible to create a bank from scratch. Rinse and repeat for every vertical of the business.

• by danielovichdk on 7/23/23, 11:27 AM

  I have so many good stories from developing software inside banking.

  Every management team I have ever worked for in banking - I have worked 4 stints in 4 different banks as a contractor - has been so old school that its been impossible to apply any up to date constructs from the professional software world.

  I once had a manager who had been with the bank for 40 years. He simply drawed 3 boxes on a board, drawed a few lines between them and asked "how long will this take ?"

  Hmm...what is in the first box?

  Old school, grey and stale. That's banking for you in Europe at least.

• by ahartmetz on 7/23/23, 10:35 AM

  They acquired Postbank (where I have an account) some years ago. Postbank had a reputation for good IT. Now they are consolidating their online banking system... Of course, on the bad system of Deutsche Bank. It's a huge mess. I need to log into two different systems for credit card and bank account things. They mailed me account statements for the timeframe of one day once and for a few days another time. I never get printed statements otherwise. The switchover is also months behind schedule.

  So, Deutsche Bank is still crap at IT.

• by bilekas on 7/23/23, 10:28 AM

  Deutsche Bank has made 5 acquisitions Norisbank 1954, Bonn

  Carron Energy 2004, Cardiff

  Better Payment 2014, Berlin

  United Financial Group 1981, Garden City

  Quantiguous 2014, Mumbai

  Given all of these needing to integrate together to some degree, and the bureaucracy of banks in general, add that to their resistence to change / improve something related to the tech if it still works, none of this surprises me.

  You see these kind of problems in all conglomerates which have to absorb other companies into their ecosystem.

  Edit :

  Slightly unrelated but I have just seen that she has passed away last year from cancer.

  https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/former-deutsche-bank-chief...

  Edit 2 : my mistake of details

• by evrimoztamur on 7/23/23, 10:28 AM

  Deutsche Bank looks like a gigantic organisation rampant with misaligned incentives and barely any oversight. Looking at their list of controversies (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bank#Controversies), it is absolutely unsurprising that their IT infrastructure is a disorganised and mismanaged mess. It looks like it's beyond saving, with its depressing history over the last decade and a half.

• by kwant_kiddo on 7/23/23, 10:41 AM

  Worked in a similar organisation also. The culture in european banks is even more dull than I expected before working there.

  The view on technology and infrastructure is very primitive... as you can also read from just the header "IT division". I initially thought that they were competent but greedy turns out the banks are really just greedy, naive and sometimes... plain stupid.

  I don't know if it's unique to Europe, but I am never working for a non tech-first company again.

• by drooopy on 7/23/23, 2:08 PM

  Perfectly sums up my experience dealing with the mess that is the IT of major German company in the automotive industry that I work for. Tons of mini-fiefdoms, each with its own strong-minded lord who has held that position for literal decades and who wants to expand their influence on other fiefdoms, an infrastructure where every single one of its components is incompatible and was never designed to work with anything else and that is held together with figurative duct tape and tons of depressed and overworked colleagues who would jump to another opportunity in a heartbeat but the money is actually good so we all just have to deal with it.

• by rkwz on 7/23/23, 10:40 AM

  > Now that Cryan's gone, however, it's becoming apparent that his authority over some senior managers at Deutsche Bank was weak. He and Hammonds' ability to challenge Deutsche's most powerful tribal leaders appears to have been correspondingly limited. "It's going to be a far more uphill task to cut systems in future," says one senior insider. "The people who control these systems don't want them cut. It's all about politics."

  > "Hammonds was innovative, but she couldn't do what she set out to do," says one DB insider. "So we're just sitting here, waiting to see what happens next."

  Yikes! Sounds like an impossible uphill task.

  Is there any examples of such turnarounds in the recent years?

• by pmarreck on 7/23/23, 12:39 PM

  As a firstborn American nerd with 100% German ancestors, it’s basically been frustrating my entire life to watch Germany whiff on basically any computer- or Internet-related technology. I can't even attribute it to the language barrier since they're all taught English at an early age. Perhaps it's that old German pride/hubris/NIH? “Stolz”… They’re a very smart people, not sure what gives. Perhaps a lack of respect for “nerd” aesthetic

  If you ever visit Germany, prepare to not be impressed by their Internet access (but possibly impressed by everything else)

• by DrBazza on 7/23/23, 11:17 AM

  Even though this is from 2018, it was and still is completely applicable to every other investment bank out there.

  Investment banking organizational structures are set up such that bureaucracy encourages 'silos' where teams can deliver quicker if they don't depend on other teams, and performance related pay dominates the managers (managing directors) thinking.

  Having worked at Megabank, it ran at least one system on SunOS (not Solaris), well into the late 2010s. It had Windows XP, long after end-of-life.

  Nothing about that story is peculiar to DB.

• by locallost on 7/23/23, 4:09 PM

  People build, sorry architect, incredibly complex systems and then try to stop them from being complex. I for one have learned to stop worrying and love the complexity. Maybe a naive question: why is it important that a company with thousands of people in the IT department all run on the same system? I mean I understand the many theoretical benefits of it, but in reality software is there to do something, and if you spend millions and millions and years and years on operating systems, what are you even doing for your customers? I am actually a Deutsche Bank customer and I do not care about operating systems they run. I anticipate people will tell me that surely this helps eventually fulfill business needs -- but does it really? In my experience and as others have pointed out, practically all other places are in the exact same mess, dreaming of holy grails of standardized infrastructure, clean code and engineering that will make other engineers pat you on the back. And some get it done and some can't, so basically at the end of the day you need people that will sort through the mess and get things done. It's never easy.

  Once they are done with all this standardization, they will realize they just have new roadblocks, and will spend a half decade trying to fix those too.

• by zxcvbn4038 on 7/23/23, 3:16 PM

  Deutsche Bank was one of the first places I worked at, closer to its heyday, I absolutely loved it. But it has been in decline for years, and has a lot of management issues, and fiefdoms.

  One of my favorite stories to retell is my wife had a job there also and she had a medical issue from a car wreck. Her boss said the bank couldn’t function if she was doing physical therapy two hours a week, basically fired her, all the paperwork was drawn up, sent to a manager in London to sign. The manager in London was “too important” to sign things so he just leaves it for someone else to rubber stamp in his name the next day. Meanwhile my wife goes across the street (literally), gets a doctor to sign her disability paperwork, walks it into HR - and instead of doing physical therapy two hours a week she was on paid medical leave for almost a year. Her termination paperwork did get signed eventually but because she was on a protected leave they had to throw it out.

• by Hendrikto on 7/23/23, 1:16 PM

  I see lots of people abbreviating Deutsche Bank as DB. Germans think Deutsche Bahn (train company) when you say DB.

  Just FYI.

• by Roark66 on 7/23/23, 11:20 AM

  I've worked as a contractor in a large bank leading a project to migrate from a plethora of backup systems into one newly built system. 30% of my time was spent on filling "paperwork". Implementation plans, risk assessments, fail back plans and so on. There was a lot of this, but people in general had positive attitude (no big difference between contractors and employees) so I think of the time as an interesting experience rather than a negative. We too had around 30 OSes to deal with, but in itself it wasn't a problem.

  I suspect the problem in DB is not it's aging, disjointed IT infrastructure, but the culture.

• by throwaway_db on 7/23/23, 10:27 AM

  This is 5 year old scuttlebutt and even what's publicly known about DB's systems has superseded most of the details here.

• by sharas- on 7/23/23, 11:57 AM

  banks are particularly low imagination, high control places. The "resources" they hire are particularly generic, safe and fungible/expendable. By definition, such "resources" are playing with themselves, creating "frameworks" and "platforms". The low imagination management of banks cannot understand that they got "resources" they filtered for and results accordingly. https://bitslap.it/blog/posts/playground-it.html

• by marginalia_nu on 7/23/23, 10:30 AM

  I very briefly worked in a similar organization a decade ago, and it checks out with how I remember things.

  Though in that case half the mess were from mergers leaving the bank with multiple instances of similar yet incompatible IT systems. Another source was the wave of regulation and reporting requirements crashing onto finance after the subprime crisis.

• by tragomaskhalos on 7/23/23, 11:15 AM

  Don't think this is atypical of many organisations that have grown their IT over a long period. When I did some work for Network Rail (here in the UK) there were some absolutely hair-raising diagrams of umpteen systems all with lines between them, doubtless many going back to BR days.

• by Havoc on 7/23/23, 11:51 AM

  I've yet to hear (in person) a single positive story about Deutsche. No doubt there are positives out there, but always found it striking how one-sided the chatter is in finance circles.

• by hardlianotion on 7/23/23, 11:02 AM

  Multiplicity of systems was a feature of nearly all banks before 2008 and was a contributing factor to some of the inability to perceive and react to risk. After 2008, and forced to by regulators, most banks focussed a lot of resources and attention to consolidate and give themselves a strategic view. Deutsche seems to have found this task far too difficult.

• by myth2018 on 7/23/23, 6:05 PM

  These days I had big trouble to get a refund from an airline. I had their confirmation, via email, that the ticket would be reimbursed. But then, after some days, they alleged, absurdly, that I had flown the ticket and hence I wouldn't get the refund.

  It turns out that they were mixing up that ticket with another one I bought, and I only managed to find that out after almost 1 month of trial and error talking with their staff, which pretty much resembled a chat-bot experience.

  We put ourselves in a sort of quicksand. Technology's promises are tempting, but there are hidden costs. We didn't know that and now we're finding out what happens when complexity is not tamed. Lessons are being hopefully learned, but I'm afraid that what we currently see is just the beginning of the nightmare

• by Tommstein on 7/23/23, 9:32 PM

  I was working for another bank a few years ago, and a recruiter for Deutsche hit me up about a role that sounded interesting, something pretty hardcore whose details I forget other than it involved C++. We finally get to the part about what they're looking to pay. Massive pay cut over what I was already making. The recruiter assured me they'd see if they could maybe possibly get me a slightly less massive pay cut. Never heard back. I assume they either never filled that role, or eventually found someone to take it who couldn't get a job anywhere else and was about to be homeless. Hearing that they're a shitshow internally does not surprise. Sometimes you get what you pay for.

• by nuancebydefault on 7/23/23, 5:38 PM

  The branch of the company I used to work for got bought around 2013 by Lear corp. Our European headquarters shifted to a city near Munich. It took 6 months for us to get at laptop that was allowed to logon to the corporate network. After less then a year, suddenly our builds became very slow. After some investigations i sent some screendumps from task manager to one of our managers, showing that 90 percent of the cpu cycles was eaten by some security service scanning our running scripts each and every time they were invoked. It took several months before they bothered to fix the resource hog. Truly the most work-hampering IT I could imagine.

• by MrDresden on 7/23/23, 7:33 PM

  Having experienced working in a legacy financial institution for half a decade, the main takeaway for me was to never work for a legacy financial institution again.

  They are horrible places if you take your craft seriously.

• by pmarreck on 7/23/23, 12:27 PM

  45 different operating systems??

  I had no idea 45 different operating systems still existed that were functional

• by rgavuliak on 7/24/23, 12:11 PM

  People say that this is just like any big IT corporation. It's not IT in Germany does a lot of things manually because it's been done like that historically and they can't fire those people due to unions.

• by BayesianDice on 7/23/23, 10:28 AM

  Note the article is from 2018.

• by PeterStuer on 7/24/23, 8:02 PM

  Sounds like every other major bank's IT environment.