Deutsche Bank has merged its asset management and private banking divisions in Australia to create a new group that will service both the wholesale and retail mar-kets.
Deutsche Bank has merged its asset management and private banking divisions in Australia to create a new group that will service both the wholesale and retail mar-kets.
Michael Monaghan, formerly Deutsche Bank’s regional head of private banking, has been made chief executive officer of the merged group and will take up his new role today.
The merged operation will be known as Deutsche Asset Management and Private Banking.
“The new structure will enable us to take our asset management activities to the retail market, while providing our private clients with more direct access to a wider range of quality product offerings,” Monaghan says
“There are many synergies between the two divisions and we expect to get a cross fertilisation of ideas.”
The new group plans to de-emphasise the Deutsche Funds Management name and strengthen Deutsche Asset Management as a brand.
It will grow out of the merger of information systems, premises and operations, but “There isn’t a huge overlap between the two divisions and we are not expecting any redundancies,” Monaghan says.
Instead, the merged group, which already employs more than 320 people, will be recruiting more staff in a number areas, in line with its plans to grow at about 25 per cent a year.
The move reflects changes within Deutsche Bank at a global level where asset management and private banking operations in the US and UK have already moved closer together.
It is also expected to allow greater leverage of the global and local strengths of the Deutsche Bank group.
Monaghan will report directly to Brian Scullin, regional head of Asia Pacific for asset management.
Deutsche’s asset management division currently manages more than $25 billion in Australia while its private banking arm has around $7 billion in funds under ad-vice.
