Dear Colleagues,

The past three months have held many special moments and highlights for our bank: we opened our new flagship building in London, hosted a series of very successful client conferences and won several prestigious awards. Just last week Euromoney named us world’s best bank for corporates. This is excellent proof of how well we already serve our clients, and this gives us the platform to focus even more strongly on our clients’ lasting success and financial security. That's why, in early May, we launched our This is Deutsche Bank framework. This was a milestone for us and I am delighted with the amount of feedback I have received on the framework and the myriad initiatives that have emerged across the bank in the meantime. We have now taken a decisive step towards becoming a purpose-led company. We have a clear goal in mind and an unambiguous strategy that will get us there. I look forward to collaborating with all of you on this journey for the lasting success of our clients and our bank.

During the past quarter, we once again demonstrated the excellent basis on which we can build in this regard. On a reported basis, our profit was down year-on-year. However, this is solely due to the legal provision of 1.3 billion euros for the litigation surrounding the takeover of Postbank in 2010. We were obliged to record this after the Higher Regional Court indicated that it may find elements of the litigation claims valid in a later ruling, something we continue to strongly disagree with. Adjusted for this, our operating strength is evident: on this basis, we generated a pre-tax profit of 1.7 billion euros, compared with 1.4 billion euros in the prior-year quarter. That’s the best second quarter result in 13 years.

With conditions still challenging, we nevertheless increased our revenues once again this quarter. Compared with the previous year, they rose by 2 percent to 7.6 billion euros. It is particularly pleasing that we were able to increase commission and fee income by more than ten percent, as in the first quarter, while net interest income remained largely stable in our core businesses. This once again underlines the merit of our diversified business model. Furthermore, we managed to increase revenues specifically in those areas in which we have invested more in recent quarters. These include, for example, the business with multinational clients in the Corporate Bank or the Origination & Advisory business in the Investment Bank, where we doubled revenues and gained market share year-on-year. We are also seeing good progress in the digitisation of our private client business, where both the amount of online banking logins and the number of digital account openings are rising sharply. In Asset Management, we continued to record high net inflows into passive products, which we have defined as a strategic growth area.

All this means that we can be confident about the coming months: we are on track to generate around 30 billion euros in revenues for the full year, as planned. And we also have our sights firmly set on the targets we set ourselves for the end of 2025, in particular a post-tax return on tangible equity (RoTE) of above 10 percent. This is within reach if we combine further revenue increases with continued discipline on capital and costs. In the second quarter, we once again delivered on what we promised: our Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1) capital ratio was a solid 13.5 percent and we were able to keep adjusted costs at five billion euros as planned.

This is a great accomplishment, for which I would like to thank you very much on behalf of the entire Management Board. Your commitment and passion are all the more remarkable considering our successes frequently require sacrifice and tough decisions. This won’t change; we must not let up on costs or controls if we want to reach our goals. However, with each step towards greater efficiency comes additional leeway to invest in our business and in growth, in technology and in you, our people.

We have achieved a lot together and are now exceptionally positioned to exploit the great potential that our bank has. I look forward to working towards this in the second half of the year.

After that, I have my summer vacation to look forward to – just as many of you hopefully do, too. If you are taking time off during the coming weeks, enjoy the break. And for those who aren’t: thank you very much for holding the fort!

Best wishes,
Christian