In an interview with the Financial Times, Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan says that his company has a staff of 97,000 while many in the industry have “half that number.”
To him, that means one thing: his financial institution is behind the times when it comes to automation and needs to embrace digital transformation. “We’re too manual, which can make you error-prone and it makes you inefficient,” Cryan told the Financial Times. “There’s a lot of machine learning and mechanization that we can do.”
According to the paper, the company has already cut around 4,000 of the 9,000 workers it planned to let go as part of a previously announced “restructuring plan.” More are likely on the way as the Frankfurt, Germany-based bank tries to realign its ratio of front-office to back-office workers.
Accounting is among the among the areas ripe for automation at Deutsche Bank, as this area falls into the category of processes that he says are “not a source of competitive advantage” in the banking world. More evidence for the need for further digitization, he says, is the dwindling utility of physical branches that employ tellers and other support staff.
“The truth is,” Cryan told the Financial Times, “if I went to a load of branches, I’d wait quite a lot of the day before I encountered [any] customers. They just don’t come in as often as they used to.”
Photo: Deutsche Bank in London. (Credit: Justin Pickard)
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