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Deutsche Bank is set to report its fourth-quarter results on Friday. In the third quarter of 2018, the bank reported a net income of 229 million euros ($262.71 million), above the 149 million euros expected in a Reuters poll of analysts. However, the performance that corresponds to the third quarter of 2018 was 65 percent below what the bank reported a year ago.
In the past few years, the bank has made headlines for all the wrong reasons — from settlements with the U.S. Department of Justice, to management reshuffles, weak earnings, constant restructuring, merger speculation and steep stock price falls.
However, Christian Sewing, the bank’s current CEO, who took the helm in April 2018 after replacing John Cryan, the bank’s leader for nearly three years, has been making efforts to turnaround bank’s ailing strategy.
Speaking to German weekly publication Die Zeit on the sidelines of WEF, Sewing said he wants to make Deutsche Bank a place that lives up to his standards.
“I want to get my job right, I want to have the right values and I want to have the passion in this bank like before; we need to bring pride back to Deutsche Bank.”
But ever since Sewing took over, he’s been faced with challenges. Last week, another report in Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources, said the U.S. Federal Reserve was investigating the German lender’s role in a money laundering scandal at Danske Bank. Deutsche was quick to deny any probe, but said it had received a number of requests for information from regulators and authorities around the world. The bank has iterated that it’s yet to see any evidence of wrongdoing on its part.
Meanwhile on Thursday, the bank said it had received an inquiry from two U.S. House of Representatives committees on the lender’s ties to President Donald Trump.
Shares of Deutsche Bank are up nearly 13 percent since the start of this year. However, shares are down nearly 50 percent over a 12-month period.
