IFR Editor-at-large Keith Mullin
The management shake-up of Deutsche Bank’s corporate and investment bank won’t represent the final shape of CIB. The new structure, so effectively leaked yesterday, looks to me like the first step in an iterative process. I’m not saying the bank pushed out details as a trial balloon, but I reckon there’ll be a bit of jiggery-pokery before things settle.
Anshu Jain and Juergen Fitschen, incumbent group co-CEOs, have added a trio of management board members and promoted some senior CIB playmakers as the May zero-hour approaches.
One result of the new order is that Hugo Baenziger, the chief risk officer whom outgoing CEO Joe Ackermann had wanted to take over as CEO, is out. No surprises there; his relationship with Jain was always going to be uncomfortable.
Jain has given the nod to Colin Fan, the highly regarded head of credit trading and emerging markets, and Rob Rankin, CEO for Asia-Pacific (ex-Japan) since 2009, to run CIB, the unit that houses investment banking, capital markets, trading, and global transaction banking. I’d tipped Michele Faissola, global head of rates and commodities and a loyal and long-serving Jain lieutenant, to potentially take one of those slots.
Anshu Jain at a news conference in Frankfurt in February (Reuters)
But Faissola is moving to run an asset and wealth-management business, a kind of hybrid position that carves out businesses currently run by asset management head Kevin Parker and private wealth management head Pierre de Weck. With the sale of the Deutsche’s asset management to Guggenheim Partners, though, it seems relatively clear that Parker and de Weck won’t stick around for long. Faissola will sit in the waiting room until a clearer role can be enunciated for him on that side of the business.
Hugo goes
One result of the new order is that Hugo Baenziger, the chief risk officer whom outgoing CEO Joe Ackermann had wanted to take over as CEO, is out. No surprises there; his relationship with Jain was always going to be uncomfortable. Group COO Hermann-Josef Lamberti is also heading for the hills.
Henry Ritchotte, COO for global markets, is taking over from Lamberti, while Bill Broeksmit, CIB head of risk portfolio optimisation will run risk jointly with CFO Stefan Krause. Stephan Leithner, co-head of investment-banking coverage and advisory – one of the few investment bankers as opposed to derivatives or trading people around Jain – is joining the management board as head of European operations. David Folkerts-Landau, global head of research, will join the ExCom.
The net result is that the group executive committee will expand, although with one significant gap. Industry veteran Seth Waugh, CEO for Deutsche Bank Americas, had already announced his decision to quit a few weeks ago. Waugh has been in that role for over 10 years and his role remains a fundamentally important one for Deutsche to fill.
So while the current new structure as leaked contains no real dramas at this point; it starts out with a massive blank slot. This has all the makings of a great simmering summer story.
