Accounting Disrupted

CHAPTER 2Unleashing Digitization

In today's era of volatility, there is no other way but to re‐invent. The only sustainable advantage you can have over others is agility, that's it.¹

—Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.com

When Mark Matthews, head of operations for the corporate bank, investment bank, and capital release units at Deutsche Bank, put the bank on the path to digital, he knew digitalizing work would improve services and help positively change the work culture by facilitating cross‐functional cooperation. His team initially created activity and organizational maps and costing models across all functions and then looked at how to bridge the mini‐ecosystems operating across the bank. One outcome of going digital was to increase accuracy and speed of work through robotic process automation (RPA) where desktop‐based digital helper apps assisted with repetitive tasks automation. The RPA applications mimicked what humans did by undertaking tasks at scale in a controlled, approved manner. In some areas, 30–70% of processes became automated reducing employee training time extensively. The RPA tools also enabled the bank to streamline manual aspects of money‐laundering process checks, saving 210,000 hours of checking work that humans would have performed. The automation process checked more than 3.4 million positions and automatically closed 380,000 accounts.

Aside from RPA systems (RPAs), the bank operationalized unattended intelligent automation where machines perform tasks and ...