Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft (NYSE:DB) Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call February 1, 2024 5:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Ioana Patriniche – Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations

Christian Sewing – Chief Executive Officer

James von Moltke – Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Chris Hallam – Goldman Sachs International

Kian Abouhossein – JPMorgan

Adam Terelak – Mediobanca

Stuart Graham – Autonomous Research

Nicolas Payen – Kepler

Anke Reingen – RBC

Giulia Aurora – Morgan Stanley

Jeremy Sigee – BNP

Andrew Coombs – Citi

Andrew Lim – Société Générale

Mate Nemes – UBS

Ioana Patriniche

Thank you for joining us for our Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Preliminary Results Call. As usual, our Chief Executive Officer, Christian Sewing, will speak first; followed by our Chief Financial Officer, James von Moltke. The presentation, as always, is available to download in the Investor Relations section of our website, db.com. Before we get started, let me just remind you that the presentation contains forward-looking statements, which may not develop as we currently expect. We therefore ask you to take notice of the precautionary warning at the end of our materials.

With that, let me hand over to Christian.

Christian Sewing

Thank you, Ioana, and a warm welcome from me. It's a pleasure to be discussing our results with you today. We have set Deutsche Bank's course for sustainable growth and returns for shareholders through our Global Hausbank strategy and 2023 saw clear progress. We delivered business growth, as the benefits of our sharpened business model came through. We grew revenues to around €29 billion with a growth rate of close to 7% per year since 2021, well above our initial target, and we are now raising our revenue growth target to 5.5% to 6.5%, with the aim of reaching revenues of around €32 billion by 2025.

We made conscious investment decisions to protect and grow our franchise by driving business growth, strengthening controls and improving operational efficiency.We have now reached an inflection point on costs; our investments are approaching completion, and we are making solid progress on our efficiency program. As a result, we now see ourselves delivering normalized operating and financial performance. This reinforces our confidence that we will deliver on our target run rate of around €5 billion per quarter for adjusted costs, including the first quarter of this year. Our guidance for the full year 2025 non-interest rate expenses remains unchanged, at around €20 billion.