The decision to develop the center in Bucharest was made at the end of last year after consideration of four capital cities in the region. The business center to house the project was chosen in July and the creation of DB Global Technology to conduct the investment followed in August.
“This will be Deutsche Bank’s fourth technology center after Moscow, Sankt Petersburg, and North Carolina. We have already started the recruitment process via Lugera and plan to hire 50 programmers by yearend,” Mihai Ionescu, 39, the banker Deutsche Bank put in charge of its Bucharest operations, told ZF.
“Once our office will be fully furnished in March 2014, we want to have 250 employees and the technology center will reach 500 by 2016.”
Ziarul Financiar reported on the subject in July, but back then Deutsche Bank had not decided on a building for its project.
Deutsche Bank sent Bill Cunningham to supervise development its technology center in Bucharest, the US executive who supervised the group’s projects in Russia, which are currently employing 1,000. However, Deutsche Bank intends to hire a Romanian to become general manager of the center.
Ionescu says the technology center will not hire bankers, nor people to answer the phones, but engineers and technical university students, who will be paid “competitive salaries, in the upper bracket of the market.”
Software engineers’ salaries range from EUR1,000 to EUR2,500 per month in Bucharest and the market is extremely competitive, because of the many technology centers in the city.
“(…) The most important factor in choosing Bucharest to develop this project was the talent pool in the IT industry. Second, the city is close enough to Germany, within the boundaries of the European Union, has a good infrastructure and is generally favorable to development of foreign business. We have even applied for state aid for IT investments, which is now being reviewed,” Ionescu added.
The Deutsche Bank official did not say how high the investment in the center was and did not reveal the salaries offered, either.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)