Deutsche Bank to resume normal bonuses, some to get raises: CEO

Frankfurt: Deutsche Bank will resume the payment of normal bonuses for 2017, the bank’s chief told a German newspaper, and some employees will get raises.
CEO John Cryan, in an interview with the Boersen-Zeitung newspaper published on Saturday, also welcomed plans by Britain to spare European banks costly capital rules after Brexit. But staff were still analyzing any potential costs of US tax reform, he said.
Bonus payments at Deutsche Bank fell to 546 million euros in 2016 from 2.4 billion euros a year earlier after a multi-billion dollar legal fine for the sale of toxic debt.
“We always said that we would return to our normal system of variable compensation in 2017,” Cryan told the newspaper. “And we will also raise salaries in some areas,” he said, without providing more detail.
The still fragile state of Germany’s biggest bank was underlined when it reported a drop of almost 25 per cent in third quarter investment bank revenue and a drop of more than a third in its bond trading division.
In addition to weak earnings, the bank has been grappling with the uncertainty of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.
This month, the Bank of England said that it was planning to allow large foreign banks after Brexit to operate as branches in Britain rather than as subsidiaries that would require significant capital.
The decision “gives us more planning certainty”, Cryan said. Deutsche Bank has 9,000 staff in London.
The newspaper asked Cryan whether the bank also expects to take a tax write-down like Credit Suisse following changes to the US tax system.
Credit Suisse said last week that it expected a write-down of 2.3 billion Swiss francs ($2.3 billion) during its 2017 fourth quarter.
“We will also be affected,” Cryan said. He declined to offer a concrete prognosis, saying that the bank was still analysing the effects of the tax code.