Deutsche Bank is said to have denied Switzerland's UBS a role in its recent capital increase due to bad blood, after the German lender lost a senior wealth manager to the Swiss bank.
In a serious blow to the morale of Deutsche Bank, the long-time head of the German lender's Asian wealth business left the firm last year to join Asia's largest wealth manager UBS.
finews.asia reported in March this year that Deutsche Bank head John Cryan had quietly extracted revenge on his former employer UBS for poaching high-profile private bankers.
The Nikkei-owned «Financial Times» (paywall) now also claims that as a result of the aggressive poaching in Asian wealth management, UBS lost its place in Deutsche Bank’s recent rights issue.
Deutsche Bank Issues
The final straw came when Deutsche became aware its Swiss rival had been trying to use the German bank's well-publicized financial strife in order to attract more wealth managers from its rival in Asia.
UBS, which had a lead role in Deutsche’s 2014 capital raising, was conspicuously absent from the eight banks named earlier this year to underwrite the 8 billion euro rights issue that ended questions about the German bank’s balance sheet strength.
People familiar with the situation told the «FT» that UBS’s exclusion partly originated from a row over Asian hiring practices.
Senior Move
finews.asia reported last October on the departure of Ravi Raju the Hong Kong based Head of Deutsche Bank Wealth Management APAC to the Swiss wealth manager.
Formerly with Citi global wealth management Raju had been with Deutsche in Asia since 2007 and was known to have engendered a fierce loyalty from his senior management team and relationship managers.
Damaged Reputation
On the back of securing the services of Raju, UBS went after several other Deutsche executives and told some that they should join the Swiss bank because Deutsche «might not be there in a few years’ time», according to the FT article.
Senior Deutsche executives in Frankfurt were furious when they heard of the hiring tactics and allegedly sin-binned UBS from the capital raising exercise.
The German bank's recently-disclosed plans to hire 100 private bankers worldwide is partly tied to the exodus suffered following Raju's departure.
