NOTE: PER TODAY NOT PUBLICLY REFERENCABLE
Deutsche Bank to deploy OakNorth’s Credit Analysis Services
No 1 German universal bank (globally no 21 by assets) with strong brand in US market will deploy
OakNorth’s Credit Analysis services to pursue growth in their German lending book
About Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bank AG (EUR 1.3 Tn assets) is a German multinational universal bank and financial services
company headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany. The bank's network spans 58 countries with a major
presence in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. As of 2020, Deutsche Bank was the 21st largest bank in the
world by total assets. As the largest German banking institution, it is a component of the DAX stock
market index. It is considered a systemically important bank by the Financial Stability Board.
DB operates in four major divisions: Corporate Bank, Investment Bank, Private Bank and Asset
Management. The German Corporate Bank serves a total of 900,000 small, medium, and large
businesses.
Engagement Overview
Rishi and Joel established themselves as proven partners of Deutsche Bank already with their last
business where DB was one of the main customers. So, it didn’t come as surprise that DB was one of the
first relationships, we started to establish upon creating the Acorn Machine (today: OakNorth Credit
Intelligence) to unlock the opportunity with the missing middle globally. We were introduced to Stefan
Bender (Head of Corporate Bank Germany) as our main executive sponsor and after DB had visited our
London offices in late 2018, a key meeting with both Bender as well as Sewing (CEO) in Mar ‘19 set the
cornerstone to get DB to agree on a POV and subsequently a pilot. The level of granularity and
nontraditional insight we had shown them during the POV was so impressive that key stakeholders still
recall these examples today. In summer 2019 we started the pilot for credit analysis working with our
business sponsor (Sandra Heinrich) and her bilateral lending team in Bavaria headed by Alex Nestroy.
Following a ~3 months covid break in spring ’20 we came to a successful conclusion in Aug ‘20. We
reached commercial agreement for a narrow, high value add, use case around new to bank clients
quickly and off we were for a 16 months vendor onboarding journey.
The pilot focused on credit analysis (i.e., providing complete borrower level credit memos) and
monitoring for new money and new to bank deals in the C&I space. The analysis was delivered in the
form of word memos and excel docs and some of our initial monitoring screens (v1 stack). At first, we
intended to work with the Relationship Management teams but after a 1-day lecture in Regensburg
(small town in Bavaria) it became apparent that the gap between traditional German commercial
banking (where one mustard producer cannot be compared to another) and us was too large for an
initial partnership. Instead, we started working with the more open-minded Bilateral Lending and
Structuring (BLS) Team based out of Munich which realized substantial value already during the pilot.
Key benefits to the BLS team
Substantial efficiency gains of up to 70% for new to bank clients. We found a very large delta in
efficiency gains and overall feedback scores for existing vs new clients given the significant
information asymmetry for existing clients that they had often covered for many year
Data driven insight on the industry, competitive landscape and peers that is otherwise costly
and time consuming to source with limited consistency in approaches across bankers
Ability to lend into markets DB is less familiar with – specifically DB is looking to grow with so
called “New Mittelstand” companies (i.e., fast growing companies in any sector that leverage
technology at the core of their operations) where forward-looking analysis is crucial to form an
opinion on the credit
Project Timelines & Scope
After singing on Dec 20th, we will start a ~1-month UAT/calibration phase in Jan ’22 to fine tune the
process and the analysis. This will be followed by making ON available to all 7 regions in Germany where
2-3 users per region will act as multipliers. The initial scope is for 50 new to bank deals in 12 months.
Team Shout Outs
Credit & Language team: Shahid, Aparna, Ashutosh, Nidhi, Abhishek Raval, Abhishek Mishra, Parikshit,
Arindam, Rakesh Choudhary, Shweta, Heena
Delivered outstanding analysis at speed for 50 deals during the pilot
Provided additional value-added analysis on covid impact
Translated many thousands of pages
Why this helped us win: fundamental to value generation
Legal / Infosec / Product Support ELT: Nitin (&Catherine), Amit (&Sandeep), Pete, Rakesh, Ashish, Peter
G, Anya and Rishi
Enabled sharing customer data under GDPR and German Banking secrecy laws
Managed detailed vendor management / onboarding process with rapid response times
Rapid and thoughtful approach to legal review and contract negotiation (contract was clean
already 1 year ago)
ELT support for negotiations to drive deal to completion
Why this helped us win: we would not have been able to run a pilot without the
groundbreaking work on data sharing and would probably still be stuck in legal and vendor
onboarding conversations without the level of knowhow, speed, and professionalism our legal
and info sec teams’ work
Product and Engineering: Toby, Lakshay, Daria and many others
Worked on initial versions of monitor bench and request hub
Worked collaboratively to find the optimal solution to deliver DB services on v2 upon go live
Why this helped us win: While services, DB sees this as a tech partnership and showing some
product is critical for building out a compelling story to renew and upsell
Customer Reference
Deutsche Bank is as of today not a publicly referenceable customer. However, we will be working with
their marketing team in Jan ‘22 to prepare a press release and secure logo rights.
Further Questions
Please contact the following with any questions:
Stefan Malchow, Account Executive & CS Slack Email +44 7555 490628
Sandip Bhattacharya, Credit Lead (Engagement) Slack Email +91-8800855751
Lakshay Mehta, Product Lead CAM (Engagement) Slack Email +91-8408958968
