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Deutsche Bank has made 5 acquisitions Norisbank 1954, Bonn Carron Energy 2004, Cardiff Better Payment 2014, Berlin United Financial Group 1981, Garden City

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-operating-officer-kim-hammonds-dies-20220704 https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/former-deutsche-bank-chief... Edit 2 : my mistake of details

jiggawatts 3y ago
My current consulting gig is at a government "superdepartment" that was formed by mashing together a few dozen small agencies that were previously already combined into large agencies. Their IT was as diverse as it gets, and then they were told to move into one building and "make it work". It's as messy and as broken as you imagine it is.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  I wonder if maybe AI could help with such an ungrateful job. Yes because one division is sending the data in XML and a 3 letter county code and values in thousands of monetary unit and another system does things in a completely different way
  - Roark66 3y ago
    >I wonder if maybe AI could help with such an ungrateful job. It's not necessarily ungrateful. It can even be interesting, but it all depends how everyone approaches it and the most important thing ever is: realistic timeliness and outcomes.
    - raverbashing 3y ago
      Yeah but it's hard not to feel it's ungrateful when you see the 5th "creative" way of doing something which is pretty much like running with a spare tire and thinking it's all good
  - dsr_ 3y ago
    No, because the field that in one system is called "cash" is called "settled" in another; system A uses BCD for money, system B uses 32 bit unsigned ints reckoned in millicents, and system C uses a cash object which can define original currency, calculated currency value, guaranteed conversion preference, contract reference number, and precision. Understanding semantics is required, not just form.
    - raverbashing 3y ago
      Yes, you got it. But I still think AI can at least make it easier
      - rvba 3y ago
        IT guys are paid a lot not to be lazy. Changing data types in an interface is a boring job (didnt Office Space joke at that?) but doing this via some broken AI will probably introduce even more spaghetti. Reality is that those systems should be killed one by one and finally when there is one system, it should be upgraded to something better. What is very difficult.
        shapefrog 3y ago
        20mil for the new system, 80mil + 5 years of implementing for the translation layers to communicate with the legacy systems. > Reality is that those systems should be killed one by one and finally when there is one system It take so long to replace each of the systems, by the time you get to the "one true solution" 40 years have passed and you are back where you started.
      - simonh 3y ago
        If you mean deep learning type systems, you need to train them on vast training sets of similar data so they can learn very general patterns, similarities and connections. Like giving them 10,000 pictures of dogs, so they can learn to recognise pictures of dogs. These banking systems are all massively complex one off systems, often with very different sets of functions or even definitions of the problem, and the implementation details are different in almost every way possible. They’re the exact opposite of the sorts of problems modern trained AI systems are good at dealing with.
objclxt 3y ago
> I have just seen that she has passed away last year at 35 years old from cancer. You’ve misread the article, she was diagnosed with cancer on 2003 aged 35, and died this year aged 55.
- bilekas 3y ago
  You're absolutely right! I'll fix that up so! Thanks
thilog 3y ago
One major acquisition that is missing from your list was the aquisition of Postbank in 2018.
sys_64738 3y ago
This is part of the problem with banks with acquisitions and why they end up being so unwieldy. In the old days we used to create gateways to each by "joining" them in some short-term strategy to merge in the long-run. But as we know nothing in the long-run generally happens due to changing priorities and differing goals of teams.
bluepuma77 3y ago
Norisbank was bought 2006/2012. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norisbank https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norisbank

jiggawatts 3y ago

My current consulting gig is at a government "superdepartment" that was formed by mashing together a few dozen small agencies that were previously already combined into large agencies. Their IT was as diverse as it gets, and then they were told to move into one building and "make it work". It's as messy and as broken as you imagine it is.

raverbashing 3y ago
I wonder if maybe AI could help with such an ungrateful job. Yes because one division is sending the data in XML and a 3 letter county code and values in thousands of monetary unit and another system does things in a completely different way
- Roark66 3y ago
  >I wonder if maybe AI could help with such an ungrateful job. It's not necessarily ungrateful. It can even be interesting, but it all depends how everyone approaches it and the most important thing ever is: realistic timeliness and outcomes.
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    Yeah but it's hard not to feel it's ungrateful when you see the 5th "creative" way of doing something which is pretty much like running with a spare tire and thinking it's all good
- dsr_ 3y ago
  No, because the field that in one system is called "cash" is called "settled" in another; system A uses BCD for money, system B uses 32 bit unsigned ints reckoned in millicents, and system C uses a cash object which can define original currency, calculated currency value, guaranteed conversion preference, contract reference number, and precision. Understanding semantics is required, not just form.
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    Yes, you got it. But I still think AI can at least make it easier
    - rvba 3y ago
      IT guys are paid a lot not to be lazy. Changing data types in an interface is a boring job (didnt Office Space joke at that?) but doing this via some broken AI will probably introduce even more spaghetti. Reality is that those systems should be killed one by one and finally when there is one system, it should be upgraded to something better. What is very difficult.
      - shapefrog 3y ago
        20mil for the new system, 80mil + 5 years of implementing for the translation layers to communicate with the legacy systems. > Reality is that those systems should be killed one by one and finally when there is one system It take so long to replace each of the systems, by the time you get to the "one true solution" 40 years have passed and you are back where you started.
    - simonh 3y ago
      If you mean deep learning type systems, you need to train them on vast training sets of similar data so they can learn very general patterns, similarities and connections. Like giving them 10,000 pictures of dogs, so they can learn to recognise pictures of dogs. These banking systems are all massively complex one off systems, often with very different sets of functions or even definitions of the problem, and the implementation details are different in almost every way possible. They’re the exact opposite of the sorts of problems modern trained AI systems are good at dealing with.

objclxt 3y ago

> I have just seen that she has passed away last year at 35 years old from cancer. You’ve misread the article, she was diagnosed with cancer on 2003 aged 35, and died this year aged 55.

bilekas 3y ago
You're absolutely right! I'll fix that up so! Thanks

thilog 3y ago

One major acquisition that is missing from your list was the aquisition of Postbank in 2018.

sys_64738 3y ago

This is part of the problem with banks with acquisitions and why they end up being so unwieldy. In the old days we used to create gateways to each by "joining" them in some short-term strategy to merge in the long-run. But as we know nothing in the long-run generally happens due to changing priorities and differing goals of teams.

bluepuma77 3y ago

Norisbank was bought 2006/2012. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norisbank https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norisbank