Deutsche Bank cuts costs by 30% with Cloud migration: CTO Bernd Leukert

Deutsche Bank

Germany-headquartered Deutsche Bank has achieved a 30 percent price reduction by migrating to the Google Cloud Platform from on-prem data storage and AI solutions, engineered through its Global Capability Centre (GCC) in India.

Deutsche Bank has roughly 8,500 people in tech, mostly in Pune and Mumbai.

“We have compared what was the cost of running before and what was the cost of running after and based on that we did it end of last year, we have kind of in average spend reduction by more than 30%,” Deutsche Bank’s Chief Technology Officer Bernd Leukert said in ‘Bank on Tech’ event in Bengaluru on February 19.

The Deutsche Bank leadership highlighted that India is driving innovation across Cloud, Artificial Intelligence, and Generative AI for the group. These advancements will eventually culminate in its vision of becoming a digital-first, data-secure, and customer-centric bank.

Meanwhile, Leukert added that not all data has gone into the public cloud, such as investment banking. This is because the system ideally should be next to the trader on the trading floor as latency and distance plays a big difference.

“Now when it comes only to pricing, we evaluate what would be the price for us to run it on premise, including of course our disaster recovery system, the resilience, the redundancy and what is Google able to offer us now the advantage,” Leukert added.

One of the benefits of shifting to the cloud is that the company does not have to prepare for peak demand, which does not happen on most days.

“You need some capacity buffer because the peak day of last year, we don't know if this is the peak day for this year. So you need minimum a buffer of 20-30% on top because that would be a shame if we are not able to serve customers because of capacity management constraints,” he added.

Leukert highlighted the inefficiencies of on-premise infrastructure, where unused capacity still incurred costs, contrasting it with the cloud's pay-per-use model that optimizes spending.