Deutsche Bank to move hundreds of programmers from Russia to Berlin

Frankfurt (dpa) – Germany’s largest financial institution Deutsche Bank has offered all 1,500 or so employees of its Russian IT centre in St Petersburg and Moscow a job in Germany, the business newspaper Handelsblatt reported on Tuesday, citing insiders.

A mid-three-digit number of employees had already transferred to the bank’s technology centre in Berlin, which is currently being set up.

Deutsche Bank did not want to comment on the report when asked.

According to a written statement by the Frankfurt-based institution on Tuesday, the staff of the new Berlin technology centre will “primarily support the ambitions of our Investment Bank and Corporate Bank through application development and the integration of new technologies.”

At the beginning of March, Deutsche Bank had announced that it considered the operational risks from a possible closure of the technology centre in Russia to be “very limited.”

“The bank’s technology service centre in Russia is one of several technology centres around the world and presents no significant business continuity risk to the functioning of Deutsche Bank’s global operations,” it said at the time.

Deutsche Bank operates other IT centres in the Romanian capital Bucharest, the US and India.

In its interim report for the first quarter, the DAX-listed group struck a more cautious note with regard to its technology centre in Russia: “We are subject to the risk that our ability to utilize these technology resources could be impaired or lost, for instance due to sanctions from the West, Russian state-initiated actions or management actions.”

With the relocation of staff now under way, Deutsche Bank is limiting its risk of losing expertise should it become impossible to continue the technology centre in Russia due to tensions between the EU and Russia over Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the Handelsblatt wrote.