Deutsche Bank: Machine Learning Has Saved 680,000 Hours Of Manual Work

By Amit Chowdhry • Nov 23, 2019
  • Deutsche Bank Head of Operations of the Corporate Investment Bank Mark Matthews said machine learning saved 680,000 hours of manual labor

This past summer, Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing said that the company was planning to cut 18,000 staff members. To help offset the loss in staff members, Deutsche Bank is deploying machine learning technology to increase productivity and redistribute capacity.

Mark Matthews, the Head of Operations of the Corporate Investment Bank at Deutsche, told Financial News that the plan is to automate large parts of the back-office through an initiative called “Operations 4.0” Operations 4.0 is targeting $6.6 billion in savings over 3 years. The cost savings includes the shutdown of the company’s equity sales and trading unit.

Machine learning tools have saved Deutsche Bank about “680,000 hours of manual work” said Matthews in an interview with FN. Plus the company has also used bots to process 5 million transactions in its corporate bank and it performed 3.4 million checks within the investment bank.

Deutsche Bank is keeping large portions of the research division at the company as it axes the derivatives and equities trading. The research division is being kept largely intact since it is low risk and operationally stable for the company.

Earlier this week, Moody’s downgraded the outlook for German banking systems to “negative” from “stable.” Deutsche Bank lost 600 billion euros of its assets and is down over 60% in terms of market capitalization since 2007.