Allow Innovations to Take Your Processes to the New Level

Leaving old ways of thinking to go new digital ways.

What are the main challenges banks face when introducing new technology?

The greatest challenge is to allow the new. To leave old ways of thinking and to go new digital ways. Digitizing old processes leads to a dead end and you have not made any progress in the result. Linking technical decision-making engines with other applications is of great importance. Each application is configured differently. Communication between the applications only works well if they can communicate optimally with one another without system disruptions. It’s like us humans.

How do you see the future credit risk management transformation with innovative automatic tools?

The tools can only support the decisions. The credit decision remains with the banker. Automatic routines increase the quality of the decision, significantly reduce working hours and increase standardization. In the future, there will only be a few complex issues in the credit decision that have to be structured individually. The mass business can only be brought to a decision in a standardized manner using automated processes.

What were the main innovation drivers within credit risk management during the crisis?

The biggest innovation was the elimination of all paper-based decision-making processes. With the introduction of digital signatures, processing led to a quantum leap in throughput times. The journeys of the credit application form from one department to the next became obsolete overnight.

Dr. Wulf-Dietmar STORM is a Head of Credit Risk & Portfolio Management at Deutsche Kreditbank AG. Wulf Storm is an agricultural scientist and did his MBA in General Management in Cambridge. He learned banking business in a German Landesbank before starting as a loan officer at Deutsche Kreditbank. He held various management positions in corporate banking for more than a decade before taking over the management of Credit Risk & Portfolio Management in 2018.