Juerg Zeltner, the former head of the wealth management business of Swiss bank UBS, has been nominated a member of Deutsche Bank's supervisory board.
Pending regulatory approval, Zeltner will replace Richard Meddings, who resigned from his supervisory board mandate after nearly four years with Germany’s flagship bank.
In his new role, Zeltner will represent the interests of Qatar's royal family, which owns 6.1 percent of Deutsche and is among its largest shareholders.
“In Jürg Zeltner we are gaining a Supervisory Board member who is a top-level European banker with proven expertise in both Wealth Management and Private & Commercial Client Business, as well as Risk Management ,” said Paul Achleitner, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank AG.
Zeltner is currently the CEO of Luxembourg-based KBL, a wealth manager made up of a network of private banks in Europe and is also held as a private investment by Qatar's ruling al-Thani family. The group manages over $80 billion in assets for wealthy individuals and families as well as institutional and professional customers.
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Zeltner joined KBL earlier in May 2019. He retired from UBS in 2018, ending a more than three-decade-long tenure with the Swiss bank, according to his biography on the company’s website. He originally joined Zurich-based UBS as an apprentice in 1984 and served on the bank’s global executive board for nearly nine years.
His leadership has turned the wealth-management division into a key revenue driver at UBS, mainly powered by inflows from wealthy Asian clients.
Deutsche Bank has been looking for new executives to mollify shareholder frustrated by the slow turnaround of the loss-making lender.
The news also came as Germany’s largest lender is talking with potential buyers for a wide range of its assets amid wider cuts at its US Equities business, including prime brokerage and equity derivatives, part of its most dramatic overhaul in recent history.
Deutsche Bank said earlier in June that is gearing up to cut hundreds of jobs in its equities trading and research, as well as derivatives trading, as part of a cost-cutting drive. The German lender plans to eliminate as many as 18,000 jobs, joining a growing list of global banks that have announced multiple jobs reduction rounds this year.
