What You Need to Know
- The bank's U.S. wealth unit wants to become one of Wall Street’s main European rivals for serving the nation’s ultra-rich.
- Arjun Nagarkatti and his team aim to add as up to a dozen private bankers this year, especially in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
- Overall, the firm has hired about 40 private bankers in the U.S. over the past three years.
The head of Deutsche Bank AG‘s US wealth unit plans to keep hiring senior private bankers in a bid to become one of Wall Street’s main European rivals for serving the nation’s ultra-rich.
Arjun Nagarkatti and his team are looking to add as many as a dozen private bankers in the U.S. 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.
The U.S. 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 U.S. helped his unit roughly triple net new assets in the first quarter when compared with a year earlier, he said.