Daimler AG to set up end-to-end financial services centre

The €130 billion automotive major, Daimler AG, is setting up an end-to-end financial services centre. The centre will be operating within MBRDI (Mercedes-Benz Research & Development India), its captive R&D arm in Bengaluru.

The centre will be fully functional by the year-end and will have a team of 70 domain specialists to start with, for which hiring has already begun.

“While we started off by leveraging our technology expertise by setting up a ‘Shared Service Centre’ for SAP applications in Bengaluru, we are now starting to build our domain knowledge here.

“We are going into two business domains to begin with — Financial & Controlling and Financial Services.

“We have started recruiting domain specialists for a Financial Services Centre that we are setting up here, which will be able to execute end-to-end design and maintain solutions for our Financial Services Division in Asia or Europe or any other geography,” Michael Gorriz, CIO, Daimler AG, told BusinessLine .

MBRDI provides Daimler with highly qualified IT engineers and an already existing infrastructure, which is in line with its global IT strategy to further expand the company’s IT department into a worldwide organisation with strong international teams.

“Nearly 35-40 per cent of our global R&D and IT team works out of Bengaluru today, making it the largest outside Germany,” added Gorriz.

Of the 2,300 engineers in MBRDI, 1,100 are part of the IT team and the rest are R&D engineers. The IT team also handles Infrastructure Services, Global Rollout Services of internal IT applications that have been developed centrally.

Plans are on to ramp up the MBRDI headcount by 1,000 employees by the year end.

After successfully hosting its first Hackathon last year at its Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, Daimler hosted its second, 24-hour Hackathon for its engineers in MBRDI Bengaluru, to foster the spirit of creativity, team work and problem-solving.

The Hackathon attracted 101 nominees, which formed 38 teams and the participants themselves voted for the top three ideas.

The winning idea, ‘Digital Sense,’ proposed the usage of NFC (Near Field Communication) technology for knowledge and data sharing. “Digital Life has entered all fields of daily social life. This mega-trend is embraced by Daimler to improve its business model, products, competitiveness and creativity.

“I am impressed with the deep technology ideas that are solutions-oriented here, compared to ideas in the Stuttgart Hackathon that were more process innovations.

“One of the ideas that I saw them develop here, is on energy savings in our facilities and the other is to streamline the shuttle transportation for employees. We are looking to invest in good ideas,” said Gorriz.