Simon Foy

There are still some reputational issues that are ongoing, but I think people within the bank hope they are largely past that and that this new strategy will bear fruit.

Sure.

So you have to go back to sort of the mid to late 90s, where sort of before that, Deutsche was very much a boring, prosaic German bank.

But it made an acquisition in the late 90s that helped basically to transform it from this German bank into what became sort of a

a European bank that took on Wall Street rivals.

And by 2007, pre-crisis, they were briefly the world's biggest bank by assets.

But it was sort of the regulatory clampdown that followed the crisis, hit Deutsche harder than many peers.

So rules that...

forced it to raise a lot of extra capital.

And there was also a litany of sort of litigation costs stemming from past misbehaviors when it was in that sort of pre-crisis boom.

So that's basically what took it to about 2018, 2019, when Christian Saving, the current CEO, took over and basically reset Deutsche's strategy.

So in many respects, his strategy was pretty simple, where he wanted to rein in this bloated investment bank that was made for a pre-crisis era, not making very much money at the time, and sort of return Deutsche to its roots in European corporate banking and repair its reputation that had really sort of

gone downhill in the years preceding him taking over.

And what's interesting about saving is that he came very much from the risk management side of the bank.

He was not this swashbuckling investment banker like many of his predecessors were.

And he changed the culture quite significantly in that he was focusing not so much on this win at all costs mentality and sort of maximizing profits, but reining some of Deutsche's excesses in and bringing it back to basics.

I think so, to which you might dispute that.

But it's certainly a safer approach to what they were doing beforehand.

And I think it is now becoming a much more stable bank.

And if you look at sort of his strategy, what it is focusing on now for the next three years, I think, was the time horizon is basically growing its corporate bank, in particular in Germany and Europe.