Anshu Jain, the controversial former co-chief executive of Germany’s Deutsche Bank, is returning to Wall Street as president of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald LP.
“With this outstanding addition, we expect to improve our already exceptional service to clients, extend and expand the products and services we offer, and increase the capital available to assist clients,” chairman and CEO Howard Lutnick said in a statement, calling Jain “my ideal partner to drive growth during the next era of Cantor’s development.”
Lutnick has rebuilt the 70 year-old firm since it was devastated on 9/11, when its offices in the World Trade Center suffered a near-direct hit from one of the airplanes hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists. His comments suggest that Cantor may look to exploit gaps left in some markets by the retrenchment of other, bigger banks. Deutsche itself has sharply cut the number of markets it intends to serve, and U.K.-based Barclays Plc (BCD) said two weeks ago it would stop business with over 7,000 low-return clients in its markets division.
Lutnick will be hoping that Jain can somehow bring his revenue-generating skills without bringing much of the baggage that overshadowed his later years at Germany’s largest bank. Jain left Deutsche in June 2015, under pressure from shareholders over spiralling litigation costs and the bank’s reluctance to cut costs and change its business model in the post-crisis world. His co-CEO Jürgen Fitschen followed a few months later, under a cloud of other long-running controversies.
Their successor, John Cryan, has since announced thousands of redundancies and suspended dividend payments.
As head of Deutsche’s Global Markets division, Jain oversaw a huge rise in revenue and profit in the early years of the millennium. However, the financial crisis exposed serious shortcomings in its business model–excessive risk-taking, fraudulent sales practices and market manipulation, among others. Just before Christmas, it agreed to settle Department of Justice claims of mis-selling mortgage-backed securities for $7.3 billion.
