Deutsche Bank to cut costs by 4.5 bn euros a year

Deutsche Bank, Germany's biggest lender, said on Tuesday it intended to cut costs by 4.5 billion euros ($5.7 billion) a year by 2015, instead of an earlier target of 3.0 billion euros. The bank did not specify how it intended to achieve the deeper cost-cutting. But at the end of July, it had already said it planned to axe 1,900 jobs mainly outside Germany as part of a 3.0-billion-euro savings programme. "The medium-term economic and regulatory outlook is challenging, hence we need to significantly improve our operating performance and efficiency," the bank's co-chief executives Anshu Jain and Juergen Fitschen said in a statement. "It is not enough to adapt our strategy to customers' changing demands; we also have to secure our competitiveness over the long term," they said. Deutsche Bank hoped to secure its long-term competitiveness via "major reductions in costs, duplication and complexity in the years ahead," it said. It would incur one-off costs of about 4.0 billion euros over the next three years with the aim of achieving annual savings of 4.5 billion euros by 2015." Nearly 40 percent of the cost-cutting would relate to infrastructure, with investment in new integrated IT platforms, rationalising regional back-office activities and centralising procurement. It would also "consolidate its real-estate footprint by putting around 40 properties up for sale." At the level of earnings, Deutsche Bank "aspires to net return on equity of at least 12 percent by 2015 ... in view of the changed market environment and stricter capital requirements," it said. And with regard to its capital buffers, it expected to achieve a Core Tier 1 ratio -- a measure of a bank's financial strength -- of 7.2 percent at the beginning of 2013. "This is planned to rise to at least 8.0 percent by the end of the first quarter of 2013 and more than 10 percent by the end of the first quarter of 2015," Deutsche Bank said.