Germany’s Deutsche Bank looks overseas as it aims to become Wall Street’s most powerful European rival

Arjun Nagarkatti and his team are looking to add as many as a dozen private bankers in the US this year with a greater focus on deepening their presence in San Francisco and Los Angeles. They already brought on wealth advisers from rivals such as Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. since the start of last year.

“Our job here is to hire a small number of really experienced bankers who focus on the high-net-worth space,” Nagarkatti, the 43-year-old head of the private bank for central Europe and the US, said in a recent interview. “Then we do it again next year.” The goal, he said, is double-digit revenue growth in the years ahead.

It’s an ambitious plan. Deutsche Bank has focused on ramping up its wealth-management businesses since embarking on an turnaround plan in 2019. But revenue from wealth management and private banking at Germany’s largest lender stagnated in the first quarter.

And with €441 billion overseen for wealthy clients globally, it’s still a relatively small player in an industry where the largest firms manage more than a trillion dollars. Rivals including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., HSBC Holdings Plc and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are all seeking to balance volatile earnings from investment banking with stable fees from managing wealthy peoples’ money.

Deutsche Bank is scheduled to provide numbers for the second quarter on July 24.

The US is one of several regions Deutsche Bank has earmarked for wealth management growth. Claudio de Sanctis, the head of the private bank, outlined plans last year for the lender to double the assets it manages for rich families in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and hired a team of Credit Suisse bankers in September for that expansion. 

Nagarkatti declined to say what share of Deutsche Bank’s wealth management assets is from the region he oversees. But the business of serving the ultra-rich in the US helped his unit roughly triple net new assets in the first quarter when compared with a year earlier, he said.

“We’re not a mass-market business,” he said. “We focus on two or three things and try do it very well. We aim to be the main European alternative to the US players in that market.”

Across Deutsche Bank, revenue from wealth management and private banking stood at €1.1 billion in the first quarter, unchanged from a year earlier. Swiss giant UBS Group AG, which is making a fresh run at the US market, and Morgan Stanley, the largest US wealth manager, made roughly six times as much.

Still, the German lender has come a long way since the early days of its restructuring, according to Anthony Valvo, US market head for Deutsche Bank’s wealth unit. Back then, staff initially had to leverage personal relationships to help persuade peers to join the firm, which was struggling to revive investor confidence. 

Now it doesn’t even have to use outside recruiters and has walked away from possible candidates who weren’t the right fit for Deutsche Bank’s culture, according to Valvo. The lender’s share price has more than doubled since it announced turnaround plans in July 2019, helping to retain staff as well as attract new employees.

The banking crisis sparked by Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse meanwhile has led to conversations with rich US individuals and families over whether they have a relationship with a foreign lender, said Valvo, who joined in 2019 and previously worked at firms including Citigroup.

“We started to see a pick-up in engagement on those discussions,” said Valvo. “New York in the northeast is always going to be a growth engine,” but “we see tremendous opportunity in the West Coast.”

Since January, Deutsche Bank hired former Citigroup executive Carl Tong and onetime City National Bank wealth adviser Brian Barclay to build up its presence in Los Angeles. Last year, it recruited Vanessa Perez from Bank of America to boost its Miami offering.

Overall, the firm has hired about 40 private bankers in the US, the largest market for wealth management services, over the past three years. Nagarkatti says that should help Deutsche Bank become the preferred boutique focused on sophisticated, ultra-rich investors.

“The business has enormous potential,” said London-based Nagarkatti, who has worked at Deutsche Bank for more than two decades. “We’re never going to be the largest player in the US, but in the space we cover, we absolutely want to be the number one.”