| | | Christian Sewing (Zaving) just closed their equity trading operations because the large number of competitors have made returns minimal or negative on the enormous amount of capital required to host trades and arbitrage.
DB hasn't lost money on any loans, as there are none beside margin accounts, but there's way too much capital tied up in inventories of stocks and bonds held for trading and being the counterparty on options etc., with not enough profit shown for all of that capital.
For example, Bank of America - Merrill Lynch offers free stock trading, living off 'order flow payments' and pays 2.64% up to 5.25% cash-back on credit card purchases and all sorts of other freebies like real-time stock charts for customers with total account balances of only $100k. DB used to be the most aggressive
DB will still do investment banking and regular retail lending.
Landesbanken (Nord LB, Bayern LB, Stuttgart’s LBBW, Hamburg, Kiel HSH Nordbank and Frankfurt’s Helaba) need to consolidate operations, just as Sewing did previously at Deutsche Bank retail operations cutting 3,000 employees, because there's not enough lending business to go around for that many retail banking offices and employees.
As with all retail, more and more of the business of offering loans is handled online. I write no checks and deposit the very few checks I receive by taking a photo with my mobile phone, and I go to the ATM machine to get cash perhaps twice a year.
It's been years since I actually walked inside a bank building to deal with humans in spite of opening 4 new credit accounts, two brokerage accounts and one new savings account over that period with three banks.
And come to think of it, I haven't even made any phone calls with any banks over the past several years. They called me once to facilitate the opening of the brokerage accounts due to necessary SEC "know your customer" regulations. |
|
