The KfW board member was recognized for KfW’s quick reaction at the beginning of the corona pandemic, which would not have been possible without the services of the IT department.
(Photo: KfW Bank)
Frankfurt Melanie Kehr is not a person who makes a lot of fuss about himself. When the 46-year-old was named “European Digital Leader of the Year 2021” in the finance category a few weeks ago by Cionet, a network of high-ranking IT managers, KfW only announced the award internally.
It is anything but natural when the state development bank receives an award for its IT services: When Kehr switched from BayernLB to KfW in autumn 2018, the institute’s IT systems were anything but good. Kehr came as a firefighter.
For a long time KfW had not had its own IT board: when the costs for various large projects in this area got out of hand, the then IT board member had to leave at the end of 2014, and CFO Bernd Loewen was then responsible for the digital department on the management board, in addition to his actual Tasks.
After a severe IT-related transfer failure in 2017, KfW and its board of directors realized that the development bank should better rely on a specialist again for the complex issue – especially since the financial supervisory authority Bafin was also putting pressure on it. Because of the IT breakdown and various other weaknesses in the computer systems, it had thundered KfW into a juicy, individual extra capital buffer.
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Kehr’s expertise in IT matters is beyond question. During her time as a management consultant at Accenture, she was mainly responsible for projects that deal with the further development of information technology in banks. She was also familiar with difficult cases: when she joined BayernLB in 2014 and became head of IT there, she was already bringing the IT systems there up to date in terms of regulatory requirements.
Melanie Kehr joined the KfW Executive Board in March 2019
That earned her a lot of recognition internally, but no position on the board. KfW offered her this opportunity. The native of Essen worked there for six months as a general representative, and in March 2019 she moved to the board of directors.
She put out the old sources of fire at KfW: Both this year and last year, Bafin reduced the extra capital surcharge from originally two percentage points by 0.5 percentage points each time. “We expect further reductions in the capital buffer in the years to come,” KfW announced on request.
Kehr has long been looking ahead: when she came to KfW, the aim was to create an IT environment that was stable and complied with regulatory requirements, she said in a video in the context of the Cionet competition. “That is addressed. But it is also important to shape the future, ”said the IT director.
Kehr’s most important innovation: the introduction of agile working in the development bank. She did not want to order the new forms of work from above, but started with individual projects in which the IT specialists worked together with colleagues from individual departments.
How well this was received by many was probably a surprise to her: “All of a sudden”, at the end of last year, 80 percent of all project teams were working with the agile working method Scrum, she said. She was positively surprised – after all, decisions beforehand were mostly made in steering committees or at board level.
According to Kehr, the agile work has accelerated the projects – and ensured a more collegial approach. The teams would now present their solutions together. Reciprocal accusations, whether the business units or the IT department are responsible for IT problems, have become less common, according to Kehr. This is so important to her that she mentions it several times at Cionet. “She is a team player, clearly in what she wants, but very pleasant to deal with,” says someone who knows her from her time at KfW.
Agile work paid off in the corona crisis
Thanks to the agile work, KfW is now able to act faster. That paid off in the corona crisis, when every day mattered for companies at risk. At that time, the development bank had to create the prerequisites in a very short time to pay out state-sponsored corona loans to companies via the house banks.
At that time KfW developed, among other things, an application with which companies could find out whether they were eligible for the auxiliary loans and which information and documents they needed to talk to their house bank from which they could obtain KfW loans. Kehr says it was only twelve days from the idea to the completion of this “KfW funding assistant”. “It’s really fast for us.”
The speed of the crisis ultimately also convinced the Cionet jury, which consists of IT heads from European financial institutions and the public sector. She praised the fact that Kehr “initiated the agile change in the banking sector and positioned IT as a real driver for change”, which enabled KfW to “react flexibly and resiliently to the challenges of the Covid crisis”.
More: Melanie Kehr – This IT expert is promoted to the KfW Executive Board – and benefits from a special rule