INTERVIEW: Deutsche Bank plans to hire 1,000 employees in India as it looks to build core technologies in-house

• The German banking giant, Deutsche Bank, has plans to onboard up to 1,000 employees this year.
• Dilipkumar Khandelwal — Deutsche Bank’s global chief information officer (CIO) of Corporate Functions Technology — revealed that the bank is looking for employees willing to learn rather than just the right set of skills, in an exclusive interview with Business Insider India.
• The aim of this hiring drive is to build competencies in-house in India so that the need for outsourcing is drummed down.

Deutsche Bank plans to hire up to 1,000 new employees this year in India at its technology centres, as it looks to double down on digitisation. The company is looking for people who have the ability to be flexible as technology changes rather than specific digital skills. This includes around 300 freshers and 700 lateral hires.

That being said, the focus is on cloud technology, simplifying the tech stack — which is the back end processes for loans, account opening and other functions — competence in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

“In line with our strategy of internalising our technology talent and growing our engineering capabilities in house, we are expecting to hire up to 1,000 employees at our India technology centres this year,” Dilipkumar Khandelwal, global chief information officer (CIO) of Corporate Functions Technology at Deutsche Bank told Business Insider India in an exclusive interview.

It is about more than just hiring the right talent
Like most big corporations, Deutsche Bank hires from the best campuses in India like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). According to Khandelwal, the bank is looking at at least 25 to 35 different colleges across the country.

And, there’s no dearth of talent. “The challenge almost comes in when you want to build those core capabilities, your existing organisation plus what you’re hiring has the right set of functional and technical depth that you require,” explained the Indian School of Business alumnus.

Core capabilities include moving the background code that a bank needs to run its applications to the cloud, specifically Google’s public cloud, and reducing dependencies. This means faster upgrades and roll-out of new services in the future.

“We’re looking at not just hiring people but also increasing the maturity of the people in terms of the skills they need to acquire,” Khandelwal told Business Insider India. This could mean upskilling or reskilling with the aim to have talent in-house. The need for outsourcing should come down.

Maturity means the capability of learning new skills and building on them to further develop technology ahead of the curve. “The overall maturity has to go up. Otherwise, you’ll always have a tendency of work getting outsourced and not having the right capabilities and decision-making powers in the right locations,” explained the man who has been with Deutsche Bank for a little over a year.

COVID-19 pandemic presented a unique challenge where most people were hired virtually. Going forward, this will only change if the pandemic numbers are low enough to make coming to the office a reality again. “At some point of time, you need to think about how you integrate them with the larger workforce and how do you get them to integrate them to be a part of the organisation’s culture,” said Khandelwal.

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