Banks scramble to patch systems, enact workarounds as coronavirus pandemic upends operations
- Banks raced to source laptops, boost bandwidth for staff working from home
- Work culture ‘changed forever’ as bankers turn tech savvy
From deploying tens of thousands of home videoconferencing kits to travelling through the night in search of screen monitors, technology chiefs across Asia are rebooting banks for a new era of flexible working ushered in by the coronavirus pandemic.
The health crisis has forced companies across the globe to rethink how to keep business ticking when staff are barred from the office by travel restrictions and shutdowns in cities from New York to Singapore.
The technical challenges of the world’s largest work-from-home experiment have been particularly exacting for bankers and traders, who are subject to a vast array of regulations put in place since the 2007-08 global financial crisis. Staff often work with finely tuned set-ups featuring as many as six monitors at their desks to access financial data in real-time.
Stuart Gurr, Deutsche Bank’s group chief information officer for Asia-Pacific, was tasked with ensuring 25,000 staff members across 14 countries in the region could remotely access their desktops, stay in contact with colleagues and clients and create effective workspaces in relatively small flats in cities, such as Hong Kong and Singapore.
It was an operation that would normally take weeks or months, but he had to do it within days, Gurr said.
“Remote working hasn't been part of banking’s core DNA,” Gurr said. So the bank had to take extraordinary measures such as deploying 50,000 videoconferencing sets globally over two weeks in February to keep employees connected.