Deutsche Bank, Google Join Forces For Cloud Services Offering

Deutsche Bank has agreed to an alliance with Google to provide the German lender with access to cloud services and to offer technology-based financial products to customers, the bank announced on Tuesday (July 7).

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Reuters reports that the strategic partnership is part of a 13 billion euro ($14.7 billion) technology investment Deutsche has planned for the next 22 years as it works to recover from years of losses.

“The partnership with Google Cloud will be an important driver of our strategic transformation,” said Christian Sewing, Deutsche Bank’s CEO, in a statement. “It demonstrates our determination to invest in our technology, as our future is strongly linked to successful digitization. It is as much a revenue story as it is about costs.”

Last week, Tim Hooley, chief technologist at Red Hat Inc., the North Carolina-based software company, told PYMNTS why organizations continue to delay their cloud migrations, and offered a guide to overcoming the sense of being overwhelmed and making progress toward automated back offices. 

“Really look at your applications from a business perspective first,” he said. “If you have an application that’s consumer-facing, for instance, is it doing the business functions you want it to be doing, or does it need to be modernized, changed or upgraded in some way?”

Google and Deutsche Bank have signed a letter of intent and plan to sign a multi-year contract within the next few months.

The partnership will enable Deutsche Bank to fuel its transition to the cloud and build on the engineering capabilities of both companies. Deutsche Bank’s mission, it said, is to transform its IT architecture and generate value for its clients.

“With this partnership, Deutsche Bank will also gain direct access to world-class data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning to better serve customers,” the bank said in a statement. 

As B2B payments account for $25 trillion in the U.S. annually, studies reveal that invoices take an average of 37 days to settle. Digitizing payments has been a priority for banks, payments processors and businesses for years.

But this digitization has had its own fair share of obstacles, such as interfacing disparate banking software and ensuring that fraudsters cannot intercept payments mid-transfer, according to the PYMNTS B2B API Tracker.