Deutsche Bank is extending its nearly 20-year partnership with information technology firm Kyndryl to support the bank’s cloud migration, according to an announcement today.

The $1.4 trillion bank is leveraging the managed infrastructure services platform to integrate automation, security technologies, workflows, tooling, data integration and cloud-computing capabilities as it embarks on a long-term cloud journey, according to Kyndryl.

The home-grown platform, coined “the Kyndryl Bridge,” offers API connectors to off-the-shelf components and is built for larger clients that integrate directly into the core, Harish Grama, global cloud lead at Kyndryl, told Bank Automation News. However, Deutsche Bank is not utilizing the Kyndryl Bridge at this time.

“We’re basing a lot of this on IP assets, and ensuring we do things like automation, but also infusing artificial intelligence and finding out the predictable patterns, whether it’s on AI operations, cost or asset management,” Grama said.

For example, when the technology plugs into the bank’s infrastructure, it gathers alerts from the cloud or the bank’s core to catch latency at an early stage, he said, noting the data captured by Kyndryl can save the bank from losing a network entirely.

Additionally, Kyndryl will integrate automation and security technologies to improve day-to-day operations, including ensuring the bank’s network doesn’t get overwhelmed, Grama said.

Cloud partners

New York City-based Kyndryl, which spun off from IBM’s infrastructure services business in November 2021, recognized that banks are making a move to the cloud and “we went there with them,” Grama told BAN, noting the extended partnership with Deutsche Bank has been in the works for nearly a year.

Once Kyndryl became its own company last year, its first partners were Azure, Google and Amazon Web Services, he said. “If you think about something like the cloud, if you’re not working with Google, Azure, AWS, you’re missing out on 80-plus percent of the public cloud market,” Gama told BAN.

Deutsche Bank, for one, taps into Google Cloud for cloud computing and migrating its business operations to the cloud, a service that Kyndryl understands through its own ties with the tech giant, according to the release.

“Our decision to renew our almost 20-year working relationship with the experts from Kyndryl is based on their experience in operating mission-critical infrastructure services for the financial industry, as well as Kyndryl’s continued ability to adapt to the changing needs of the banking and IT industry,” Gordon Mackechnie, chief technology officer at Deutsche Bank, said of the partnership.

Editor’s Note: This story has been corrected to clarify that Deutsche Bank is not currently utilizing the Kyndryl Bridge platform. An earlier version implied that this was the case. It is the policy of Bank Automation News to correct erroneous information.