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Asian Calm

In Asia, de Sanctis has relative calm and a stalwart – Lok Yim – who has been instrumental in keeping the business floating in the region with little notice of the trouble in Frankfurt. De Sanctis now wants to chop 100 million euros in spending from the unit’s bill, mainly by near-shoring, saving on office space, and rolling out «agile» technology work processes. 

This year's statistics are encouraging: more than half Deutsche’s private banking clients have over 50 million euros, or so-called ultra-rich clients. One-third of revenue is booked from newer markets like Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. And de Sanctis obviously has Sewing’s blessing to continue hosing the super-rich in those countries with balance sheet funds.

Reliance on Germany

Conversely, de Sanctis remains highly reliant on Germany, which probably makes for roughly 40 percent of overall wealth funds. That’s not terrible – if Deutsche Bank can’t win at home with its own wealthy, it has little hope of doing so elsewhere.

The problem is that Germany is a text-book case of how Deutsche has gone back and forth over how to handle its wealthy clients: it subsumed the home market into its wider European market last year, only to reverse course and split it out again last week.

It remains to be seen whether de Sanctis can keep the top private bankers he has poached happy – like Goldman Sachs’ Marco Pagliara, who takes over a European market hollowed out by the German change.

Dwarfed by Retail

Deutsche’s overall size is also a problem: it is growing quickly – but from a low base. And de Sanctis’ unit makes for just one-fifth of the revenue in the wider retail client unit it sits in (infuriatingly, Sewing termed this «private bank» in the revamp).

To be sure, the wealthy in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America will welcome Deutsche’s lending spigot. Whether the wealthy in Switzerland and the U.K., more traditional markets, will be equally tempted remains to be seen.

Clients «expect us to advise them on how to escape from the interest rate pressure by moving their investments to higher-returning assets,» CEO Sewing said on Tuesday. «We have had strong performance in this respect this year.» De Sanctis, at the center of Sewing’s restoration efforts, has his work cut out for him.