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FRANKFURT - DEUTSCHE Bank will sack about one in seven traders, roughly 900 staff, in its single biggest cut to investment banking since the onset of the financial crisis, sources with knowledge of the plan told Reuters.
The German bank, which had initially managed to duck the worst of the financial storm, is seeing frigid markets sap earnings in what used to be the engine room of its business - investment banking and trading.
The staff will be cut from Deutsche Bank's global markets division which employs around 7,000 traders. Most are in London and New York, and those locations are where the axe will fall hardest, sources said.
These individuals are among the highest paid in the City of London and on Wall Street. They would typically take a disproportionately large share of the 13 billion euros (S$24.5 billion) Deutsche paid to its more than 80,000 staff last year.
Deutsche made its name creating and trading stock-market and debt products. But this business has been hit by the markets freeze that also forced thousands of redundancies at rival UBS which cut about 4,600 jobs in investment banking alone.
'There will be huge adjustments to those trading businesses that have stopped working in the crisis,' one source told Reuters, adding that the areas of proprietary trading and structured products would be hit.
'We are talking about cuts of about 900 jobs,' the source said. Other businesses such as foreign exchange trading will be largely unaffected by the cuts, the source added.
Deutsche Bank declined to comment.
'Given that trading continues to go badly, it would have been wishful thinking to believe Deutsche would not have to make big cuts,' said Mr Konrad Becker, an analyst at German bank Merck Finck. -- REUTERS
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