Deutsche Bank Private Bank is far from the only global wealth manager to have transformed its business model and its fortunes in recent years.
But no other lender surely has done it so successfully, swiftly and apparently seamlessly.
The story begins in 2020, when chief executive Christian Sewing set out to push the German financial services firm in a new direction.
He created the International Private Bank, which combined the old private and commercial business international, merged it with the broader wealth-management group, and tapped Claudio de Sanctis, a former head of global wealth management, to run it.
The Italy-born de Sanctis then moved to build a ‘bank for entrepreneurs’ to serve the corporate and wealth-management needs of business owners, offering them investment advice, wealth structuring and tax-planning services.
That offering – while still in its early days and only operating in a handful of markets – has already proved a success; in the full year 2023, it pulled in more than €1.5