The move by Deutsche Bank to appoint an institution veteran, David Lynne, to head its global transaction banking in Asia Pacific in May was not unexpected. It can be taken as part of the on-going strategic cost management and right sizing at the bank.

Following the third annual year of loss, $621 million in 2017, and disappointing first quarter 2018 performance, CEO Christian Sewing, had written to staff in April of the urgent need to adapt to changed market conditions and to reduce workforce and right-size the bank.

Lynne sees this as a necessary part of re-organising the bank, he said:” You never want to lose senior people but, sometimes it actually creates some room and oxygen for the people underneath. It changes their energy and the strategy.”

His immediate focus however is to continue to focus on key customer relationships that the bank has built over the years.

“In my area, our core focus is on transaction banking, financing and fixed income and currencies. We want to facilitate the business flows of our key multinational clients across corporates and financial institutions both into APAC and outbound,” he emphasised. “The key strategy is how do we drive that better, in a more coordinated and focused fashion.”

It is a question of scale

Despite once being the largest bank in the world at the peak of its aggressive and what was ultimately unstainable expansion in the early 2010s, Deutsche Bank now in a new post-crisis regulatory landscape, and like many other European banks, faces the issue of scale.
“That’s a problem statement for European banks in general. The European banks largely do not have a 500 million-people universe. They don’t have capabilities across every country in that universe. And scale has been a thing,” Lynne remarked.

He continued: “Fixed cost of production has gone up massively and if you spend that, you want to have as many users of sc...

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Keywords:Financing, Fixed Income, Digitalisation, Technology