Deutsche Bank's new chief wants time to decide on strategy

Deutsche Bank's new chief, John Cryan, said Wednesday that he intends to take until the autumn to consider how to tackle the current challenges facing Germany's biggest lender.

Without calling into question his predecessors' strategy, which he himself approved as member of Deutsche Bank's supervisory board, the 54-year old Briton said he felt it "right to take the summer and early autumn to decide how to best execute those decisions.

"We will therefore update the market with further details by the end of October," he said in a statement to the bank's employees.

Deutsche Bank announced last month that its two co-chief executives were stepping down in the face of a wave of scandals and the company's failure to meet profit targets this year.

Anshu Jain stood down at the end of June, while Juergen Fitschen plans to stay on in the job until after Deutsche Bank's annual shareholder meeting in May 2016.

Cryan -- who previously served as chief financial officer for Swiss bank UBS from 2008-2011, and has been on Deutsche Bank's advisory board since 2013 -- officially took over from Jain as co-CEO on Wednesday. He will be in sole charge when Fitschen steps down next year.
The "Strategy 2020" that Jain and Fitschen unveiled includes a refocus of Deutsche Bank's activities and downscaling of its retail banking operations, as well as the planned sale of its Postbank subsidiary.

"We are too diversified and too complex for our own good. We must simplify our business model," Cryan said.

"We will narrow the scope of our activities. We do not have to be all things to all people. Where we encounter marginal business opportunities or businesses with poor prospects or business lines that are not controlled to the standards we demand, we will exit them, even if this means closing them down."

Cryan insisted he was "optimistic" but warned "there will be ups and downs."

He said Deutsche Bank "will continue to invest in our retail and business banking, asset and wealth management and investment banking businesses. No longer, however, can our securities and derivatives trading businesses be so heavily reliant on long-term balance sheet usage. We cannot afford that luxury."

Germany's largest lender is mired in around 6,000 different litigation cases and was last month fined a record $2.5 billion (2.2 billion euros) for its involvement in an interest rate-rigging scandal.

Deutsche Bank, which employs a workforce of more than 98,000 people and has annual revenues of some 32 billion euros, continues to lag behind its Anglo-Saxon rivals.