Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft (NYSE:DB) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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And hence, we are working on additional incremental measures in order to make sure that our costs are staying flat over the next three years and that obviously then works into our operating leverage. So in this regard, we have an assumption that the inflation is coming back clearly to below 5% in 2024 and then to 2% in 2025. We know this is always very complex to forecast at this point in time, but that is something, in which we have so to say in our plan, but the key assumption is, and what I can see also from the additional tools, James and Rebecca are working on, for instance, on driver-based cost management, and the way we can now really see the transparency and drive the cost is that we need to do more than the €2 billion, and we are able to do it.

James von Moltke: And then on the compound growth rate. Look, we liked the idea of reiterating the targets. Obviously, our confidence in the high end and potentially exceeding it is higher today than perhaps a year ago. But we didn’t see a need necessarily to raise that target at this point in time. We can happily live with a target that looks conservative as things stand. Remember, again, FX has a pretty big impact and there’s lots of other things. The other thing I just want to say is, remember that there was a business growth aspect in the compound growth rates that we provided in March. So we broken out the interest rate driven improvement, which is good but we’re also confident about the underlying growth rate, given the drivers that you’ve seen, for example, the €41 billion of net new business volume in the PB in 2022. So we’re going to keep on working with that. And if we can exceed that target so much the better.

Anke Reingen : Okay, thank you.

James von Moltke: Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Tom Hallett from KBW. Your question, please.

Tom Hallett : Hi. Just couple of questions for me, please. So on the deposit beta, it’s been a big topic over the last few months. If you could just provide us with some color on the retail corporate deposit dynamics? And does it remain below your target rate? And then secondly, on capital/buybacks. I mean, if I’m not mistaken, you said maybe January 1, next year, you’ll be operating with about 13.2% go to level. And in the meantime, we’ve got a lot of other inflation. You’ve got Basel III kind of finalization stuff coming through payouts of dividends and so forth. It feels that even if the market conditions there’s going to be up, the chance of a buyback still pretty low, is that fair? Is that the best way to understand? How should I kind of understand that? Thank you.

James von Moltke: Thanks for the questions, Tom. And so on deposit beta, we talked about this a little bit last quarter. We look at, in essence four portfolios, dollar, and Euro, and then our Private Bank that is retail and Corporate Bank books. And what we’re continuing to see at the moment is the betas or elasticity, as we see it, showing a very large lag. It’s very significant in percent percentage terms. Obviously, we don’t go into it in detail. But that lag continues, in essence to surprise on the upside at the moment, reflecting I think that the models that we build around this historical behaviors don’t really capture what happens in a rate cycle where your starting point is negative, or zero, depending on the currency and the pace of the rate increases at the short end, is as rapid as it has been.

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