By Jenny Strasburg 

This article is being republished as part of our daily reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S. print edition of The Wall Street Journal (August 26, 2019).

Deutsche Bank AG and UBS Group AG this year explored ways to combine their businesses, including talks as recently as mid-June to form an unusual alliance of investment-banking operations, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The talks between Germany and Switzerland's biggest lenders show how far European lenders are willing to go to address a punishing banking environment. Hammered by negative interest rates and slowing economic growth, European banks are struggling to compete globally and fend off encroachments from bigger U.S. rivals on their home turf.

A deal never coalesced, as the two sides failed to sort out thorny issues, including how to structure and allocate capital to any joint operations, the people said. Deutsche Bank and UBS for years have contemplated exploring a merger, the people said. One person who has been involved in multiple deliberations said the talks have been on and off but never fully off the table.

Inside Deutsche Bank, a tie-up was seen as a way to save Germany's biggest bank from the painful cuts now in motion, the people said. The banks discussed a full-blown merger earlier in the year, a move that would have created a European banking behemoth more able to compete with Wall Street's most dominant players, such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Bloomberg reported in May that the two banks briefly explored a merger. The June talks haven't been previously reported.

UBS has suffered from volatile performance in its investment bank, and shares currently trade near their lowest point since it restructured its business in 2012. Deutsche Bank's shares trade just above their all-time low hit this month.

The mid-June discussions, held near Milan, included the finance chiefs of both banks, senior investment-banking executives and advisers, some of the people said. The executives discussed ways to swap some operations and intertwine parts of their investment banks but keep the parent companies separate, according to the people familiar with the talks.

The people said a concept behind an alliance was to play to the strengths of both lenders, as Deutsche Bank, which remains a big player in its fixed-income trading and structuring business, would get referrals from UBS, which pulled back from some of those business lines several years ago. Deutsche Bank would feed business into UBS's more successful equities franchise, the people said. UBS was interested in some of Deutsche Bank's deal-advisory teams in the U.S., a person briefed on the discussions said.

Such a venture was seen by some involved as a possible test case, some of the people familiar with the talks said. It might have allowed the German and Swiss banks -- and regulators, governments and investors -- to gauge whether a merger might make sense, without committing to a new headquarters, regulatory regime or full restructuring, the people said.

Deutsche Bank's then-investment-banking chief Garth Ritchie was at the meeting in Italy, along with Alexander von zur Muehlen, who is Chief Executive Christian Sewing's top internal adviser on strategy. So was UBS's Robert Karofsky, co-president of the investment bank, people familiar with the meeting said.

UBS Finance Chief Kirt Gardner attended, and Deutsche Bank's CFO, James von Moltke, dialed in, people familiar with the talks said. Tadhg Flood, a partner with deal advisory firm Centerview Partners, was advising the German bank, the people said. He previously served inside Deutsche Bank and remains a confidant of Mr. Sewing. On the UBS side was Jonathan Wills, the people said, another Deutsche Bank alum who worked this year for consulting firm Oliver Wyman. In June, Mr. Wills joined UBS as head of investment-bank strategy.

Earlier in the year, when Deutsche Bank was in talks to merge with crosstown rival Commerzbank AG, Deutsche Bank had parallel discussions with UBS to combine their asset management arms, The Wall Street Journal and others reported in April.

UBS Chairman Axel Weber earlier this year discussed with German officials the potential merits of a UBS-Deutsche Bank deal, and UBS Chief Executive Sergio Ermotti was also open to exploring the idea, some of the people said.

The full merger talks went on for weeks, but by May they bogged down over regulation of the investment bank and the location of a combined bank's headquarters -- Zurich, Frankfurt, a third location where neither bank is located, or some combination of the three, according to people familiar with the talks.

By June, Deutsche Bank was running out of time. While talking with UBS, the German bank was planning cuts and discussing with other banks selling off stock-trading technology and pieces of its prime-brokerage franchise, which serves hedge funds. French bank BNP Paribas eventually struck a deal for some of those businesses.

The alliance discussions with UBS were short-lived; UBS walked away after the Milan meeting, some people familiar with the negotiations said. Deep cooperation short of a merger is rare in the banking world. People involved in the talks said the two sides decided they couldn't quickly sort out how to structure the operation or share capital between the entities. One of the people said the idea was a long shot.

On June 21, Mr. Sewing emailed business heads demanding additional details for executives preparing the "equity story" for a major restructuring, people familiar with the internal communications said.

Some inside the bank said the crunch of hurried decision-making left executives little time to finalize senior management and cost-cutting decisions. They say the impact is still felt, with confusion about what services the bank will keep and how much capital those businesses need.

On the first Sunday in July, Messrs. Sewing and von Moltke laid out a reorganization that included the departure of three management-board members, including Mr. Ritchie, and 18,000 job cuts. There will also be a major pullback from the bank's Wall Street presence, with an exit from most of its equities business and more investment in its strongest fixed-income and advisory businesses.

Write to Jenny Strasburg at jenny.strasburg@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 26, 2019 02:47 ET (06:47 GMT)

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