Deutsche Bank has announced a bombshell purge of thousands of staff as part of a radical restructuring.

As thousands of Deutsche Bank employees rocked up to work only to find out they no longer had jobs company executives were being fitted for expensive suits, according to reports.

On Sunday, Deutsche Bank announced 18,000 job cuts around the globe by 2022 as part of a sweeping overhaul at the ailing German lender, as the company transitions out of high-risk investment banking.

The following morning, disconsolate Deutsche Bank staff from Australia and Asia to the United States were dealt the blow about massive lay-offs as they arrived at work.

Newly redundant employees were soon seen traipsing out of their buildings carrying boxes and bags of personal effects. Some were reportedly crying while others headed to the pub to drown their sorrows.

Among them were two men believed to be bank employees photographed holding suit bags as they exited Deutsche’s London headquarters, the hub for the global investment division.

It was widely reported the pair were leaving the building with their belongings after being fired. The photo was widely disseminated on Twitter and was used by the Guardian, Financial Times and Reuters.

But it turns out they were wrongly identified.

Ian Fielding-Calcutt and Alex Riley, tailors who work for Fielding & Nicholson Tailoring, were actually on site to fit $A2700 suits for a group of senior staff unaffected by the job cuts at the bank, according to theFinancial News.

“It was just a coincidence that we were snapped coming out of the building at the time others were being sacked,” Mr Fielding-Calcutt, the owner of the tailoring firm, told Financial News. “The assumption was we were one of the bankers being fired, but we were there to fit suits for senior members of staff.”

Deutsche declined to comment.

Deutsche Bank careers end in an envelope, a hug and a cab ride https://t.co/hJ1iJnvksD pic.twitter.com/ZuM85qzpbD — Reuters Top News (@Reuters) July 8, 2019

Meanwhile, the Balls Brothers pub nearby was doing a brisk trade by early afternoon. Most of the 50-odd drinkers, downing beer and sparkling wine, had shopping bags filled with what looked to be files and mementos.

Several wore grim expressions, facing up to a future in which Brexit is already complicating life for City bankers as Britain exits the European Union.

“It’s a bad time to be looking for a job with the normal summer lull and generally poor market conditions,” Joseph Leung, managing partner at Aubreck Leung, a London executive search firm, told Bloomberg.

“That said, the Deutsche people could be attractive as they are effectively free agents — they will likely be getting their stock and won’t have any notice period so can start straightaway.”

At Deutsche Bank’s US headquarters on Wall Street, some staff arrived with bags for their personal belongings and others left with thick white envelopes akin to ones seen in London.

One former employee was crying, and others were making plans to meet at a local bar, Bloomberg said.

But as reporters and photographers gathered outside the New York offices to try to spot laid-off workers, one man leaving the building joked he should have carried a box to get his picture in the news.

Germany’s biggest lender is slashing around one-fifth of its workforce, reducing it to 74,000 employees, in a bid to cut annual costs by six billion euros ($A9.6 billion) and return to sustained profits.

The new round of job cuts comes on top of some 6000 already carried out over the past year.

The restructuring could be a last chance for Deutsche Bank after much-hyped merger talks with Frankfurt rival Commerzbank fell through earlier this year.

The German financial giant’s share price fell to a low of 6.66 euros ($A10.76) before closing down 5.4 per cent at 6.79 euros following Sunday’s announcement.

“We need to focus our bank on where we are most competitive … (and) provide our strong businesses the oxygen to prosper while withdrawing it from others,” Deutsche Bank chief executive Christian Sewing told reporters on Monday.

“We need to do more than merely trim the perimeter like in the past,” he said, before visiting the bank’s London offices where redundancy packages were being handed out.

The job cuts hit Deutsche’s equity trading business, leaving other divisions of investment banking unscathed.

The headlines about the lay-offs generates questions from clients, but “my message to my clients is ‘nothing’s changed’,” a New York banker told AFP.

The banker did not personally know anyone laid off but said the announcement added to the grim morale in the US offices.

“It’s just another indication of our failed strategy right now,” the banker said. “Who knows whether they’re done or not?”

Analysts said it was high time for Deutsche Bank to stop its decades-long drive to emulate the investment titans of Wall Street.

ING analyst Suvi Platerink Kosonen said the restructuring was “essential for the bank” in the long run but cautioned it entailed “substantial execution risks”.

The overhaul spans the world and was felt first in Asia, where the bank is winding down its equities business from Sydney to Mumbai.

Attendance at Deutsche Bank’s offices in the towering International Commercial Centre in Hong Kong had already fallen dramatically in recent days, Bloomberg News quoted an insider as saying.

Staff were particularly unhappy about what they perceived as poor communication between Germany and the Asian branches in recent weeks as reports of the new strategy circulated, it reported.

— with AFP

megan.palin@news.com.au | @Megan_Palin