Deutsche Bank's pain can be your gain!

July 12, 2019

Deutsche Bank recently announced that it will cut 18,000 jobs globally by 2022 to save roughly $7 billion dollars in annual expenses. It plans to close its equity trading business and also some parts of its fixed income operations, resulting in these job cuts across Asia, the UK and the US.

So knowing this, how have DB’s prime and other fund servicing businesses fared recently after the big announcement? RADiENT aggregates all data of investment advisers globally from their Form ADV- their funds, assets under management, as well as the service providers they work with such as prime brokers, administrators, custodians, marketers and auditors. This makes RADiENT Form ADV a great source of information for developments in this space.

Using the Service Provider Trends tool, we noted the following statistics on Deutsche Bank’s prime business since the start of 2019.

 DB prime brokerage clients in 2019

  Dec-18 Jul-19 Change
# Firms 285 274 -11 (-%)
# Funds  820 775 -45(-%)
Funds GAV $2.07B $1.93B -$136M (-%)

 


Deutsche Bank lost 45 funds overall in 2019


 

To get a more detailed picture, we looked at the individual firms and funds where DB has served as prime broker.

Long term clients like Angelo, Gordon & Co and Highbridge Capital Management continue to be DB clients. However, various investment advisers across the globe have discontinued listing Deutsche Bank as their prime:

A selection of DB'c clients and changes in business

  Prime Admin Custodian
Alpine Associates Management Inc.
10 Funds (GAV $2.8B)
(New Jersey, United States)
-8 funds
(GAV $2.6B)
   
Thunderbird Partners LP
1 Fund (GAV $2.9B)
(United Kingdom)
-1 fund
(GAV $2.9B)
   
Asia Debt Management Hong Kong Ltd.
9 Funds (GAV $1.13B)
(Hong Kong)
  -4 funds
(GAV $941M)
-3 funds
(GAV $762M)

You can take view more details about these firms on RADiENT.

So who got the largest slices of the pie? We further broke down the data to find out which of Deutsche Bank’s competitors have most benefited from these developments and identified the prime brokers who now service the funds that have dropped DB in 2019 – the big names like Goldman, Citi, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley came out on top.

Top prime brokers for funds that dropped DB as prime broker since 2019

Prime Broker No of funds Gross Asset Value
JPMorgan Chase 47 $196.66B
Morgan Stanley 37 $260.24B
The Goldman Sachs Group 35 $178.37B
Credit Suisse 34 $205.61B
Bank of America Corporation 30 $243.41B
Barclays Bank 30 $215.44B
Citigroup 28 $266.1B
UBS Group AG 22 $157.62B
BNP Paribas 18 $128.53B
Scotiabank 13 $82.06B

 

It will be interesting to see how Deutsche Bank's business gets affected in the light of recent upheavals. As of now, 272 firms  continue to list Deutsche Bank as Prime Broker while 711 advisers list them as custodians.

Deutsche Bank still boasts big names like Blackrock, AQR and Citadel as its customers, but with recent downsizing, we may see more large firms parting with DB as their preferred service provider. Sign up on RADiENT to find out who’s staying, or who may become your next client!


About the Author

Yash Mehta

Yash loves all things tech and leads the Regulatory Analytics effort at RADiENT. He is particularly interested in applied mathematics and it's application in finance. He has previously worked at the Clearing Corporation of India where he developed risk management systems for the launch of interest rate swaps clearing as well as development of risk models and portfolio compression. He holds a Bachelors of Science in Mathematics from Jacobs University, Bremen and is a CFA Charterholder. Yash enjoys reading and is a Manchester United fan.

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