Deutsche Bank (DB) - Get Report shares were the biggest decliner in Germany Thursday after the bank posted a bigger-than-expected fourth-quarter loss and lifted its litigation reserves to more than €7 billion after fines linked to U.S. mortgage bonds and Russian money laundering hammered its bottom line.

Deutsche Bank said its net loss for the three months ending in December was €1.9 billion ($2.05 billion), higher than €1.2 billion billion figure anticipated by analysts. Revenues for the three months ending in December were €7.1 billion, the bank said, a 6% increase over the same period last year. The bank added €2.6 billion to its litigation reserves in the quarter, it said, with the total now at €7.6 billion.

Full-year revenues were marked at €30 billion, Deutsche Bank said, down 10% from 2015, a decline which it said reflected "a challenging market environment, persistent low interest rates, Deutsche Bank-specific pressures and strategy execution."

Deutsche Bank shares fell more than 6% in early Frankfurt trading to change hands at €17.93, the biggest decline on the DAX performance index, but are still more than 47% higher over the past three months.

"Our results for the year 2016 were heavily impacted by decisive management action taken to improve and modernise the bank, as well as by market turbulence for Deutsche Bank," said CEO John Cryan. "We proved our resilience in a particularly tough year. We finished 2016 with pleasingly strong capital and liquidity ratios and we are optimistic after a promising start to this year."

The Frankfurt-based lender, Germany's largest, said its core capital ratio (CET1) improved 80 basis points to 11.9% as of the end of 2016 and that its overall risk-weighted assets fell €39 billion to €358 billion.

Underlying strength in the bank's bond trading unit, however, helped revenues rise 11% in the final three months of the year amid the extreme volatility in global fixed income markets.

Deutsche Bank last this month that it would "substantially limit" bonuses for senior employees in its 2016 payment structure after it finalized its $7.2 billion legal settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice related to the sale of mortgage bonds into the peak of the global financial crisis.

Deustsche Bank had already cautioned that it would take a pretax charge of about $1.17 billion to its fourth-quarter results, which it will publish on Feb 2., but didn't expect the settlement to have a material effect on its full-year performance.