Deutsche Bank logs ninth straight quarter of profit with big earnings beat

Deutsche Bank on Wednesday crushed market expectations for the third quarter, amid higher interest rates and turbulent market trading.

The bank reported a net income of 1.115 billion euros ($1.11 billion) for the quarter. Analysts had predicted a net profit of 827 million euros, according to data from Refinitiv.

“We are seeing the benefit of interest rates come through in our corporate bank and private bank, essentially those with large deposit books and we are seeing our FIC [fixed income and currencies] business managing this environment extremely well,” James von Moltke, CFO of Deutsche Bank, told CNBC’s Joumanna Bercetche.

CEO Christian Sewing said in a statement that the bank is “well on track” to meet its 2022 goals. In the medium term, the bank said it aims to achieve returns on average tangible equity to above 10% by 2025.

Here are other highlights for the quarter:

• Revenues rose 15% from a year ago, and hit 6.92 billion euros.
• Common Equity Tier 1 ratio, a measure of bank solvency, stood at 13.3% from 13% a year ago.

Looking at the bank’s individual divisions, investment banking revenues increased 6% from a year ago. In particular, revenues in Fixed Income and Currencies were up by 38% over the same period and helped offset lower performance in Credit Trading.

Within this context, the bank said revenues in Origination and Advisory dropped 85% year on year, pointing to lower deal making — as has been the case with some of its U.S. peers.

Corporate Banking, however, saw the biggest jump in revenues among all divisions, up by 25% from a year ago.

Deutsche Bank also said it had further reduced its exposure to Russian credit over the same period. The bank has been cutting its ties with Russia in the wake of Moscow’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. As a result, additional contingent risk fell to 0.2 billion euros, from the 0.6 billion euros at the end of the second quarter. 

The German bank reported higher provisions in comparison to the same quarter a year ago. These came in at 350 million euros at the end of the third quarter, compared to 117 million euros at this time last year.

The bank said these reflected a “more challenging macroeconomic forecasts.” Speaking to CNBC, von Moltke reiterated his expectation of a recession in 2023 in Germany and the broader European market.

Despite the poor growth expectations, Deutsche Bank believes the European Central Bank will continue to hike rates. At the moment, the main ECB rate stands at 0.75%.

“We do think terminal rates have now begun to converge towards our view and that would probably be more like 3% for the ECB and 5% maybe 5.5% … for the Fed. I think that’s important because the critical thing is to get inflation under control and therefore we are entirely supportive of the central bank actions,” von Moltke said.

Shares of Deutsche Bank are down about 17% so far this year. The German lender beat expectations back in the second quarter with a profit of 1.046 billion euros.