Deutsche Bank is launching a comprehensive digital campaign: Christian Rhino, Chief Information Officer of the Private Banking division, explains why true AI value cannot be created without modern architecture, clean data, and a lean operating model - and why in the Private Banking division, around €900 million will be invested in IT, operations, and artificial intelligence over the next three years. He shows how agentic AI is already accelerating modernization today, how it is helping to streamline the IT landscape in the long term, and why “tech literacy” will become a core competency of the future. A conversation about speed, transformation, and digital banking that noticeably reduces the burden on customers.
Deutsche Bank is tackling digitalization and AI transformation on a large scale. What kind of scale are we talking about? How many teams/employees were involved in the latest major digitalization project? :
RHINO An impressive example of the scale of our digitalization projects is the launch of our new online and mobile banking services, which we successfully completed in August last year. We completely revamped the technical infrastructure and created a modern, cloud-based platform that is being used jointly by all our brands in Germany for the first time. This will enable us to develop new digital products and services much more quickly and efficiently across all brands in the future.
Successfully implementing such a transformation requires enormous joint efforts. Several hundred colleagues were on duty during the final migration weekend alone. But the decisive factor was the months of close cooperation between business areas such as the Private Customer Bank and the experts from my technology division. This interaction is what makes projects of this magnitude possible in the first place.
What areas will you be focusing on in your future digitalization investments? :
RHINO At our Investor Day in November 2025, we announced that we would be investing around €900 million in our Private Banking business over the next three years, including in IT, operations, and AI. The main driver behind these investments is the fundamental modernization of our operating model. Today, we still work with 15 different core banking systems worldwide in our retail banking business. In the future, we will consolidate this landscape into two modern, cloud-based platforms – one for our broad retail banking business, personal banking, and one for wealth management.
A key accelerator in this process is agentic AI: it supports us in areas such as code translation and data management, and helps us to modernize our technology more quickly. At the same time, we are significantly simplifying our application portfolio and plan to reduce the number of our applications by around 40 percent.
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