Chief executive has taken drastic action that was unpalatable to predecessors

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

When Christian Sewing took over as Deutsche Bank’s chief executive last year, the writing was on the wall for the German lender’s investment bank.

Sewing has spent most of his near 30-year career at Deutsche working in commercial banking, audit and risk – not on the trading floor of the investment bank that grew to dominate the company in the 2000s and became a costly burden.

The German joined Deutsche aged 19 in 1989 as an apprentice in a branch in his home town of Bielefeld. The keen tennis player and Bayern Munich fan had originally wanted to be a sports journalist.

“My father thought it was very important that I do an apprenticeship of some sort first, regardless of what I decided to study afterwards,” he told the newspaper Handelsblatt. He stayed and, apart from a couple of years at a mortgage bank in Hamburg, has remained at Deutsche ever since.

Sewing – pronounced “zay-ving” – joined the management board in 2015 and ran the company’s retail and commercial banking businesses before becoming chief executive.

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As retail banking head, Sewing showed no squeamishness about cutting more than 3,000 jobs and closing hundreds of branches. On taking over as chief executive, he set about cutting jobs across the bank as well as banning first-class train tickets and scrapping daily office fruit bowls.

His appointment to the top job was a departure from Deutsche’s record of choosing investment bankers. His predecessors, John Cryan and Anshu Jain, joined Deutsche after holding senior jobs at rival investment banks and continued to support the division’s high-paid traders.

Cryan clashed with Deutsche’s chairman, Paul Achleitner, and was criticised by German politicians over his decision to keep paying big bonuses to investment bankers. Marcus Schenck, a former Goldman Sachs banker who was co-deputy chief executive alongside Sewing, quit when Sewing became the boss.

But Sewing’s initial cost reductions failed to stop Deutsche’s share price from falling, leaving him little choice but to take more drastic action. With little affinity for the world of securities trading, he has now set about making cuts that were unpalatable to predecessors who were also investment bankers.

Sewing told analysts on Monday: “No one is more disappointed than I about our share price. It is our responsibility – our duty – to demonstrate Deutsche’s core value.”

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Married with four children, Sewing spends the week in Frankfurt and travels back to Bielefeld to spend weekends with his family. He has close links with Germany’s business and political elite but is said to be blunt and demanding when it comes to getting things done within Deutsche.

He told analysts he would invest big chunks of his salary in Deutsche shares to show his commitment to his plan: “I am putting my money where my mouth is.”

After his first round of cost cuts, Sewing tried to dissuade valued bankers from leaving by travelling the world and holding anything-goes question and answer sessions. If his remaining investment bankers are unhappy about the downgrade to their business, he may be clocking up more air miles.