Change of staff on the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank – Wynaendts is to take over

Frankfurt The outgoing chairman of the board of directors of Deutsche Bank, Paul Achleitner, has a soft spot for football comparisons. So it’s no wonder that Achleitner used Frankfurt’s Eintracht victory in the Europa League the night before to campaign for his designated successor, Dutchman Alexander Wynaendts.

“You can obviously win the Europa League from Frankfurt, even with an Austrian as a coach. A Dutch coach will certainly be needed for the Champions League,” he said in his farewell speech at the virtual shareholder meeting.

The choice of the former, long-standing Aegon boss Wynaendts is considered safe. However, some investors had also criticized in the run-up to the general meeting: the fund manager from Union Investment, Alexandra Annecke, for example, does not want to vote for Wynaendts because she believes he has too many other mandates. But she also complained that he had little experience with German corporate governance or the management of a major bank.

The 61-year-old Dutchman knows the criticism. In his introductory video, which he recorded in German and English, he tries to approach the skeptics. He emphasizes his enthusiasm for technology, his experience gained from the time at the major Dutch bank ABN Amro, the Dutch insurer Aegon and as a member of the board of the US major bank Citigroup.

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He “gladly” gave up his mandate at Citigroup, which he said was “very close to his heart”, for Deutsche Bank. If elected, “I promise to do everything in my power for this great institute,” he said. In doing so, he clearly signaled his priorities with regard to his other mandates, such as the supervisory board positions at Uber and Air France-KLM and the consulting mandate at Salesforce.

Achleitner looks back on turbulent times

Other shareholder representatives such as the fund house Deka or the German Protection Association for Securities Ownership want to support Wynaendts. “We think he’s the right man at the top of the supervisory board,” said Deka fund manager Andreas Thomae. “Unlike his predecessor, he hopefully steers through a somewhat calmer phase.”

Thomae is alluding to the turbulent, often crisis-ridden times that the bank went through during the era of Supervisory Board Chairman Achleitner: the phase of the bank’s biggest financial scandals, which cost the financial institution many billions of euros in penalties and over which Anshu Jain’s management duo in 2015 and Jürgen Fitschen had stumbled. The phase in which the bank wrote billions in losses because the transformation cost a lot of money. The phase in which hardly any investor believed Deutsche Bank capable of turning the tide.

The head of the supervisory board, Achleitner, was also regularly criticized. Because he had stuck with the management duo Jain and Fitschen for a long time – and because he brought some managers to the board who failed in their tasks. Some saw it as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

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Wrongly, as CEO Christian Sewing thinks. Achleitner had to take a lot of criticism and many personal attacks, often for things that he inherited and was not responsible for. Achleitner always had the board’s back in difficult times. “In these moments, having a supervisory board chairman who listens and who supports you in word and deed and does not become impulsive but keeps calm is invaluable.”

The bank presented a six-minute video at the Annual General Meeting against the critical appraisals of Achleitner in the media. In it, current and former board members and supervisory board members described their thoroughly positive memories of Achleitner’s tenure.

“He leads with a sense of humor and keeps composure in the best sense of the word in really unpleasant situations,” said Henriette Mark, who was a member of the committee for a long time as the employee representative. Achleitner’s attitude, which he once expressed to David Folkerts-Landau, the institute’s chief economist, may have contributed to this calm: “The dogs are barking, the caravan is moving on.”