Because Deutsche Bank will scrap 20% of the branches
Deutsche Bank has announced that it will close a fifth of its branches in Germany, motivating the decision by accelerating post-pandemic digitization.
One in five branches of Deutsche Bank will close its doors in Germany. “We want to reduce the number of branches from 500 to around 400 as quickly as possible”. This was announced by Philipp Gossow, head of the group's retail banking, at a conference organized by the Handelsblatt newspaper in Frankfurt.
In this way, the German credit giant will try to save costs and capitalize on the changing habits of customers during the coronavirus pandemic. As an executive told Reuters .
The new round of branch closures follows a similar initiative launched in 2016 when Deutsche reduced the number of branches from more than 700 to around 500.
The closures will happen "as quickly as possible," Gossow pointed out.
THE DEUTSCHE BANK PLAN
The bank's plans have yet to be discussed with the works council and the jobs that will be lost in the affected agencies are part of the 18,000 job cuts already announced by the chairman of the board, Christian Sewing, in July 2019 as part of the of the new strategy of the group.
THE RENOVATION STARTED IN 2019
Since 2019, Deutsche has been in the midst of a restructuring involving a partial withdrawal from investment banking activities, a radical contraction of its balance sheet and 18,000 job cuts by 2022. In the early stage of the Covid-19 crisis, Deutsche had temporarily suspended the layoffs.
MOVING TO MOBILE BANKING
Deutsche Bank customers will be able to carry out more ordinary transactions in the future in the network of approximately 800 branches of the subsidiary Postbank, after a long integration project with the parent company. According to Gossow, customers are now more accepting of online and mobile banking than ever before.
“The coronavirus has further changed the needs of advisory services and branch offices,” Gossow said.
Gossow also reported that more complex advisory services are increasingly taking place via telephone or video call and the bank would invest an (undisclosed) sum to develop such digital services.
On the other hand, as the Financial Times points out , Deutsche's retail unit, which has more than 22 million customers globally and accounts for more than a third of revenue, generated € 269 million in losses in 2019. .
LIKE THE COMMERZBANK RIVAL
The decision follows a move by domestic rival Commerzbank. The institute announced this summer that it would not reopen 200 – of the 1000 branches – closed during the pandemic.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/perche-deutsche-bank-rottamera-il-20-delle-filiali/ on Tue, 22 Sep 2020 13:10:59 +0000.