You don't have to be big to be good at risk management, but it helps. So Deutsche Bank is well placed. "There's a lot of business we would find it harder to do without being a big plain-vanilla interest-rate and credit derivatives player," says Charles von Arentschildt, head of global markets North America at Deutsche Bank.
His colleague Jon Kinol, who is in charge of interest-rate derivatives, says: "It means that clients come to us with the knowledge that we can handle it."
Deutsche is a big player in the plain-vanilla markets and has got bigger over the past year. That, in the US at least, could perhaps be a response by clients to issues that have affected some of the more established players in their market, such as concentration risk, merger hangovers, downgrades and perceived reputational hits.
According to a mix of the bank's own data and that from the Bank for International Settlements and the British Bankers' Association, Deutsche has outpaced the growth of all the major derivatives markets in 2002. Overall credit derivatives volume grew 119%, for example, whereas Deutsche's increased by 170%. Its interest-rate derivatives volume grew 70%, as opposed to 40% in the market overall, and its equity derivatives volume jumped 106% while the overall market expanded by just 17%.