Deutsche Bank to hire 1,000 people in India this year

Santosh Thomas joins Virtusa during a time of significant growth and follows the recent appointment of Sander van‘t Noordende

Deutsche Bank will hire 1,000 techies for tech centres in India this year. The Germany-based financial services giant expects the abundant local tech talent pool to give a fillip to its digital transformation strategy in the country.

Over the last couple of years, Deutsche Bank has been investing significantly to create technology capabilities internally to cater to changing consumer needs. Its CEO Christian Sewing said that the company will spend 13 billion euros between 2019 and 2022 on the bank’s digital transformation journey.

According to Dilipkumar Khandelwal, Global Chief Information Officer for Corporate Functions and the Global Head of Technology Centres, Deutsche Bank, India has a key role in this journey.

“There is a conscious effort on creating an engineering driven culture, to get our people to internalize and get more people to focus on engineering and coding aspects to build niche capabilities that are required for the bank,” he said, in a recent interview to Moneycontrol.

The company has identified four regions for technology centres, with India being the biggest among them. Its India tech centre already has 4,000 employees, with the bank now ramping up. The other locations include Russia, US and Romania. It is in these centres where the majority of the hiring is happening to build engineering capabilities.

While India is an integral part of the digital transformation strategy, Khandelwal said that it would be difficult to share how much of the tech budget will come to India.

The last few years have seen large multinationals set up technology captives in India and, over time expanding their presence. Analysts Moneycontrol spoke to said that global banks such as JP Morgan, Citi, HSBC, and RBS, which have had captive presence in India for many years, are scaling these to hire tens of thousands of employees.

The pace is likely to increase in the coming months. Lalit Ahuja, founder and CEO, ANSR Consulting told Moneycontrol, the next three years will see 150-200 captives set up centres resulting in the hiring of over 3 lakh people in new and the existing centres.

While the captive boom is good news for techies in terms of jobs and salaries, it poses a risk for IT services companies such as TCS, Infosys, HCL Tech and Wipro, as more clients now look to insource rather than outsource.

"It is true that large enterprises are aggressively growing their in-house capabilities and this is taking some work away from the third-party service providers. However, the huge demand for digital and other IT talent is overwhelming this trend and creating a strong growth market for the service providers," Peter-Bendor Samuel, CEO, Everest Group said.

So while companies may have a long-term preference to in-source, the current demand for IT projects means that they cannot get internal talent fast enough, particularly in the hard-to-find digital talent area.