Günter Degitz

AlixPartners

Munich www.alixpartners.com

gdegitz@alixpartners.com Tel: +49 1511 6267 599

Biography

Günter Degitz is Managing Director and Head of the Financial Advisory Services practice at AlixPartners with focus on forensic investigations, regulatory reviews and high-profile independent monitor engagements. He brings over 30 years of professional experience in high-profile investigations, major forensic account and transaction reviews, global regulatory remediation programs and management consulting for international banks and corporates. He has deep expertise in FCPA-, sanctions- and AML-related reviews and investigations.

What attracted you to a career in digital forensics?

I spent many years in IT consulting for Hewlett Packard and BCG before moving into the compliance and forensic field. Having a deep understanding of the complex data and IT systems and the management-consulting background, I found forensic investigations a very attractive area to leverage my experience to help clients in critical situations and make investigations more effective. Factual and meaningful results are the basis for the right decisions and the best remediation programs.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a global practice?

When working in multiple places in the US, Asia, Europe, involving and with/for regulators around the globe, you view your clients’ challenges differently and design solutions from a global perspective. You have to be working with the best experts in different jurisdictions if you want to help the leading global banks or corporates to overcome their regulatory failures or investigate critical allegations. You have to serve your client locally and bring the experience of your global network. Act local – fix global.

What trends are you seeing in terms of misconduct, tax fraud and money laundering? Does the pandemic remain a major motive for these trends?

The regulatory environment and technology shift to the cloud forces the industry to improve their global compliance programs and strengthen their governance in the first, second, and third line of defence. We continue to see a vast amount of AML, sanctions, and cyber engagement, using new - highly complex - patterns that are hard to identify and successfully investigate. With the move to crypto, the detection and investigation capabilities of the organizations need to move into a new era. Our digital forensic expertise is highly asked for right now.

Your experience spans a range of practice areas from compliance and data protection to product liability and M&A. To what extent does the type of case impact your approach to providing expert testimony?

The critical value I bring to clients is the mix of deep IT and forensics expertise, and board-level consulting skills and the experience of 30-plus years in the banking, automotive, pharma, tech, and many other industries. This allows me to work with senior management to investigate and fix their most urgent situations in the compliance, cyber, data protection, and regulatory field or critical M&A situations.

What common challenges do you see in companies as they move into a more data-driven culture, and how can these challenges be tackled?

The complexity of implementing a global data architecture with the parallel push to move to the cloud is a significant challenge and opportunity. The companies need a clear master plan and strong governance to successfully make this move and ensure regulatory compliance and IT security simultaneously. This needs to be a top priority for the board of all large international corporates. For the global banks the challenge is to also cope with their regulatory remediations programs in parallel and to find the talent in the market to make this transition. This requires significant investments in the years 2022 -2024 but will have a great reward when they achieve a global data lake and can use the scale of cloudbased solutions.

What underrated skills would you encourage budding e-discovery experts to develop?

We have moved our forensic data centers to the cloud and run our forensic investigations in the cloud with the highest data security and privacy standards. This expertise is highly valuable for our clients and means that senior forensic experts need to be cloud-savvy and become senior experts in cloud computing.

Looking back over your career, what has been your proudest achievement?

Having worked on some of the most critical investigations, such as Lehman Brothers, Siemens, Hypo Group Alpe Adria, or Wirecard, as well as having served on the compliance monitor teams for Swiss and German multinational bank.

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Act humble and always consider the impact of your recommendations before you act.

WWL says: Günter Degitz receives effusive praise for his “experience with a range of different software and data analysis approaches” as well as “his ability to very quickly bring a proposal and move to implementation”.