AI in banking Frankfurt

Deutsche Bank runs DB Lumina, a research agent that summarizes documents, extracts data, answers questions about uploaded files and drafts and translates text. In their Google Cloud blog post on DB Lumina, Max Sommerfeld of Deutsche Bank and Crispin Velez of Google report around 5,000 users in Deutsche Bank Research. Deutsche Bank is also rolling out the Financial Research agent from Google in its Corporate Bank, starting with the teams that serve German MidCorp clients, where it prepares client briefings and financial analyses. That is also where AI in investment banking and corporate banking starts in Frankfurt: preparing the analysis, with the banker making the call.

Commerzbank put Ava, a banking avatar built on Microsoft Azure AI, into its app. Customers can order a new credit card, block or unblock a card or change limits in the conversation, and Ava hands over to the customer center when a question gets too complex. Both banks also use other tools for AI applications in finance.

DekaBank, the asset manager and securities house of the savings banks, launched DekaGPT 2.0 for its staff, a chatbot that searches several large documents at once. According to Handelszeitung, citing Bloomberg, almost 1,800 employees use the internal chatbots, and a voicebot is meant to take load off the phone lines.

Helaba, the Landesbank of Hesse and Thuringia, and Schwarz Digits, the IT arm of the Schwarz Group, have a strategic partnership on digital sovereignty in the financial sector. Helaba and Schwarz Digits want to build finance applications, in particular in AI and digital marketplaces, on open-source technology and European data protection and security standards. Helaba Invest, the fund subsidiary of Helaba, already processes incoming invoices for its funds with AI (in German).

ING Germany, headquartered in Frankfurt, uses generative AI in customer service to answer inquiries or route them to the right team. ING Germany combines fixed, rule-based flows with generative parts and uses retrieval-augmented generation, so answers come from verified internal sources and product documents.

Frankfurter Sparkasse and Frankfurter Volksbank reach AI through their groups. As savings bank, Frankfurter Sparkasse belongs to the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, whose IT provider Finanz Informatik runs the generative AI assistant S-KIPilot in its own data centers; about 147,000 people in the group use it, according to the FI magazine (in German). Volksbanken get their IT from Atruvia, whose fraud models check transfers against a customer's usual pattern. DZ BANK, the central institution of the cooperative banks, has its head office in Frankfurt and is a Finance Loop event and network partner.

A Frankfurt bank has its supervisors in the same city. The ECB supervises the significant institutions, BaFin has one of its two offices here, and the Deutsche Bundesbank runs the German side of on-site inspections. BaFin published guidance on ICT risks from AI under DORA, covering the whole life of a model from data sourcing to shutdown and the cloud and model providers behind it. Together with BaFin, the Bundesbank consulted the industry on machine learning in risk models, with explainability and data as the main questions.

AI fraud detection in banking stays outside the high-risk line of the EU AI Act, but section 25h of the German Banking Act already requires banks to run systems that detect unusual transactions. For AI in banking in Germany, consumer credit scoring is classified as high-risk.

Finance Loop brings together the model validators, compliance officers, product owners and engineers who bring AI into Frankfurt's banks. Finance Loop connects the finance, IT and AI communities in Frankfurt and holds events in Munich, Berlin and Hamburg too.

Finance Loop presented fAInance, a conference by Sopra Steria and Fraunhofer IAIS near Frankfurt Airport, open only to staff of financial institutions, with stations on AI against financial crime and AI in governance, risk and compliance. For AI Week Frankfurt, it ran an official side event with Frankfurt Main Finance and AI Hub Frankfurt, with talks on AI as an investigator in anti-financial crime and on trusted AI and AI testing. With Frankfurt Data Science, Finance Loop runs events on AI governance, and with Finteda it supports Claude Hacker House at TechQuartier, a hands-on AI training format for people from banks and tech.

AI in banking is the use of machine learning and generative AI in a bank's work: chat assistants for customers and staff, fraud and money laundering monitoring, credit and risk models, and tools that read and draft documents. In Frankfurt, most of it supports staff, and a person approves the result.

Frankfurter Sparkasse belongs to the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, whose IT provider Finanz Informatik runs S-KIPilot, a generative AI assistant for savings bank staff operated in its own data centers. Which tools a single savings bank switches on is its own decision.

fAInance, held near Frankfurt Airport by Sopra Steria and Fraunhofer IAIS for staff of financial institutions, is the closest match. AI Week Frankfurt by AI Hub Frankfurt has had banking side events, and Finance Loop lists AI and banking dates in the calendar above and on the events page.

Frankfurt School of Finance & Management runs a part-time Master of Artificial Intelligence & Data Science. For a hands-on start, Claude Hacker House at TechQuartier builds working prototypes with Claude, and AI Hub Frankfurt runs workshops and trainings for companies.