GFT and Deutsche Bank awarded first place for ‘Best Fintech partnership’ at prestigious Financial Innovation Awards

• Harnessing its new ways of working, the combined project team was able to accelerate development and decommission some 2,000+ end-user applications, replacing them with a single standardised strategic platform, providing managers with a single view of performance across the business.

• The collaboration has delivered substantial business benefits, including reduced risk, cost, man-hours and errors, along with improved operational decision-making, controls and compliance.

GFT, the global IT consultancy for the financial services industry, and Deutsche Bank were recognised as overall winners in the ‘Best Fintech Partnership’ category at the Financial Innovation Awards 2017.

Now celebrating 20 years of innovation, the Financial Innovation Awards from The London Institute of Banking & Finance are a globally recognised awards platform, showcasing the best innovation across the financial services industry.

The strong relationship between GFT and Deutsche Bank saw the implementation of an innovative and ambitious project (dbPalace) with high levels of collaboration between GFT and the bank in order to build and roll-out a strategic Risk and P&L production platform. The dbPalace team set out to create a dynamic and agile IT function in order to speed up release times, reduce IT costs and enable the bank to react quickly to customer and market demands.

This programme successfully resulted not only in significant operational efficiency (with output increased by 35% and development costs reduced by 50%), but has also enabled the bank to create a much-needed competitive advantage, by unlocking innovation, empowering its people and ensuring that the company is able to adapt quickly to ever-changing market trends and challenges.

The project delivers a single strategic global platform, capable of handling the day-to-day tasks of 1,000+ users. Headed up by a 200-strong dbPalace team comprising both GFT and Deutsche Bank specialists, spread across eight locations worldwide, the innovative project sought to improve both the experience and performance of Product Controllers and Finance Directors by way of; reduced errors, reduced duplication of effort and reduced task completion times.

Chris Bezuidenhout, CIO for Markets Finance at Deutsche Bank commented: “dbPalace is an example of a programme where the needs and requirements of Finance are understood and acted upon by a passionate and committed IT team, with the users at the heart of every decision. It has been excellent working with GFT on this project. They understand my business requirements and were very focused on helping to deliver solutions we can really use.”

Rather than view dbPalace as a single project with an end date, the team instead manage it as a ‘branded product’. As such, the team continues to enhance and improve dbPalace’s features and functionality over time, based on user feedback, emerging technology and changing end customer and business demands.

Alpesh Tailor, Executive Director at GFT (Global Account Manager for Deutsche Bank, Capital Markets) commented: “The collaboration amongst the whole dbPalace team has made the project a truly effective partnership. There is no distinction or walls between locations, or internal versus external members; exactly how a team should work collaboratively and deliver a common goal. This success has defined the ‘gold standard’ for other strategic IT programmes within the bank”.

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