Friday, 26 April 2024
Deutsche Bank outlines significant strategic transformation and restructuring plans
As part of its ongoing commitment to improve long-term profitability and returns to shareholders, Deutsche Bank’s Management Board announces a series of measures to restructure the bank’s operations. These measures include the following:
The exit of global equities and a significant reduction in corporate and investment banking risk weighted assets
Deutsche Bank will exit its equities sales and trading business, while retaining a focused equity capital markets operation. In addition, the bank plans to resize its fixed income operations, in particular its rates business and will accelerate the wind-down of its existing non-strategic portfolio. In aggregate, Deutsche Bank will reduce risk-weighted assets currently allocated to these businesses by approximately 40%.
The bank will create a new Capital Release Unit to manage the efficient wind-down of the assets related to business activities, which are being exited or reduced. These assets and businesses represented $83.07 billion (EUR 74 billion) of risk-weighted assets and $323 billion (EUR 288 billion) of leverage exposure, as of 31 December 2018.
These actions are designed to allow Deutsche Bank to focus on and invest in its core, market leading businesses of corporate banking, financing, foreign exchange, origination and advisory, private banking, and asset management.
A significant restructuring of businesses and infrastructure
Deutsche Bank will implement a cost reduction program designed to reduce adjusted costs to $19.08 billion (EUR 17 billion) in 2022 and is targeting a cost income ratio of 70% in that year.
To facilitate its restructuring, Deutsche Bank expects to take approximately $3.37 billion (EUR 3 billion) of aggregate charges in the second quarter of 2019, of which approximately $0.22 billion (EUR 0.2 billion) would impact Common Equity Tier 1 capital. These charges include a Deferred Tax Asset write-down of approximately $2.25 billion (EUR 2 billion) and impairments of approximately $1.01 billion (EUR 0.9 billion). Additional restructuring charges are expected in the second half of 2019 and subsequent years. In aggregate, Deutsche Bank currently expects cumulative charges of $8.31 (EUR 7.4 billion) by the end of 2022.
Managing the transformation through existing resources
Deutsche Bank management intends to fund its transformation from its existing resources without requiring additional capital. This reflects the bank’s current strong capital position as well as management’s confidence in the high quality and low risk nature of the assets, which it is exiting. In connection with these decisions, the Management Board intends to recommend no common equity dividend be paid for the financial years 2019 and 2020. The bank expects to have capacity for payments on additional tier 1 securities throughout the transformation phase.
Updated capital and leverage targets
The Management Board believes that the future business mix is consistent with a lower capital requirement. After consultation with the bank’s regulators, the bank now intends to operate with a minimum CET1 ratio of 12.5% going forward. As a result of the significant deleveraging actions, the bank targets a fully-loaded leverage ratio of 4.5% by the end of 2020 rising to approximately 5% by 2022.
Preliminary Second Quarter Results
Including the charges related to the restructuring described above, Deutsche Bank expects to report a second quarter 2019 loss before income taxes of approximately $561.29 million (EUR 500 million) and a net loss of $3.14 billion (EUR 2.8 billion). Excluding these charges, Deutsche Bank expects to report second quarter 2019 income before income taxes of approximately $449.03 million (EUR 400 million) and net profit of $134.71 million (EUR 120 million). Results reflect revenues of $6.96 billion (EUR 6.2 billion) with noninterest expenses of $6.29 billion (EUR 5.6 billion) and adjusted costs of $6.01 billion (EUR 5.35 billion).
The bank intends to release second quarter results on 24 July 2019.
