Deutsche Bank's Transformation Continues

Deutsche Bank is accelerating its bid to become a bigger player on Wall Street by placing more emphasis on its asset management and wealth management divisions.

The German banker has been know mostly for corporate lending, a report in The Wall Street Journal observes, but Chief Executive Josef Ackerman hopes to expand the company's presence in the U.S. and Germany as an investment and retail bank, as well as an asset and wealth manager.

Konrad Becker, an analyst at Merck Fink & Co., said, "From being a corporate lender it's now successfully transformed itself into mainly an asset-management and investment back." Becker, however, said that for Deutsche Bank to be a successful asset manager in the long-term, it must further diversify from its fixed-income business, on which it has become too reliant.

To further its transformation, Ackerman, who took over in 2002, has dramatically trimmed the company's workforce, slimmed its number of managing directors from eight to four, installed more investment bankers as managing directors, and made English, not German, the bank's corporate language. He's also hired a pair of Wall Street veterans, Anshu Jain and Michael Cohrs, to further guide its push in the U.S.

The staff of Money Management Executive ("MME") has prepared these capsule summaries based on reports published by the news sources to which they are attributed. Those news sources are not associated with MME, and have not prepared, sponsored, endorsed, or approved these summaries.