You know Deutsche Bank as a major player in the financial services industry — but do you know it as a tech company? In 2014, the banking giant launched Deutsche Bank Labs. These innovation groups help the company stay competitive, working with tech startups to meet the bank’s business needs and introducing new technologies and solutions into the bank. The New York location launched in March and has already made significant contributions to the bank.
We caught up with analyst Yasmin Omrani, who’s responsible for expanding the labs’ presence within both the bank and the local fintech community.
Can you describe Deutsche Bank Labs?
DB Labs is not an incubator, an accelerator or an investment fund. Think of it as a pipeline. We aim to build a pipeline of internal demand challenges, or specific requests that come from teams in the bank, matching them to external solutions. We also introduce new technologies to propel the bank forward and offer better services to our clients as fintech continues to disrupt the financial services industry.
The lab is located away from the 60 Wall Street office to allow our employees to fully remove themselves from their day-to-day work and really focus on out-of-the-box thinking. We introduce teams to new startups to show them they can be doing things differently, and we also host various groups in our labs to break traditional mindsets.
What’s your role within the lab?
I manage relationships and engagements with key internal and external partners to encourage innovation at the bank and educate the bank about important fintech trends and technologies. I also help evaluate new technologies. Our main goal is to bring new solutions into the bank. Given my background in data science, I can help assess startups to see if their technology is compelling and if there’s a fit in the bank.
How does the bank decide which technologies to move forward with?
DB Labs is demand driven. When there’s a request in the bank that fits within our strategic priorities, we work with the respective teams to better understand their demand challenge — and then to find, vet and experiment with the right solution. This can be external solutions but also sometimes internal solutions.
The supply and demand can be identified in various ways. Sometimes, we have been introduced to an interesting startup. And we connect them to the right team internally that can adopt their solution. Other times, teams come to us with a demand challenge and we tap into our networks and partners to find the right solution.
What are some of the most innovative technologies to come from the lab?
The most innovative technologies we’ve experimented and adopted with thus far lie in the AI and automation space. These technologies help automate manual and repeated work, freeing up people to use their talents to save the bank money and do more interesting work.
The NYC lab launched in March. What kind of progress have you seen so far?
Since our launch in March, we have received a lot of requests from our business partners to learn more about the labs, to use our space and, most importantly, to leverage our expertise and resources for finding solutions that can help their day-to-day.
What’s great about the labs is that we are the door into the bank. For a startup, it can be very difficult trying to get into a huge enterprise and then find the right people to demo to. We are the first stop for startups to pitch their product. Once we review the product, we can then guide them on the business line that might be interested. Since DB Labs has been operating, we have evaluated over 1,000 startups.
Why do you think it’s important for such an established bank to introduce new technologies?
In retail banking, new technology incentivizes customers to stay with a bank (for example, who has the best app?). In trading, technology continues to improve platforms, making it easier to do business from wherever the client is.
Fintech is disrupting financial services and, if we ignore this, we will be at a competitive disadvantage. Startups have discovered ways to introduce efficiencies into enterprises. The fact that the bank has invested so much in the labs and in our ability to capture new technology shows that we are moving in the right direction.
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