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Deutsche Bank’s chief risk officer Olivier Vigneron is leaving after just three years, following successive warnings from Germany’s largest lender that bad loans will be worse than expected.
The bank said on Thursday that former Commerzbank chief risk officer Marcus Chromik would replace Vigneron in May. Deutsche added that Vigneron, a former JPMorgan trader who joined the German lender from France’s Natixis, had decided not to seek an extension of his contract.
Deutsche Bank warned investors in October that they should brace for higher than expected loan losses for the second time in almost three months. Provisions for bad loans would rise to €1.8bn this year, up from €1.5bn in 2023, it said.
Deutsche’s chief financial officer James von Moltke told journalists at the time that the bank was “not happy that we haven’t achieved our guidance [on loan losses]” but that it was “not concerned that there is a broader-based deterioration of the portfolio in the underwriting”.
The bank said that higher loan losses were driven by the commercial real estate crisis, some “larger corporate defaults” and retail loans that turned sour over a botched IT integration.
Deutsche chair Alexander Wynaendts said in a statement that he was grateful for Vigneron’s “many contributions and his commitment to steering the evolution of the bank’s risk function” and that he was “delighted to announce a risk manager as highly regarded as Marcus Chromik”.
Chromik attracted significant scrutiny in Germany in March 2020, when he cashed in more than €100,000 in profits after shorting Germany’s blue-chip Dax index at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Commerzbank, where Chromik served as chief risk officer from 2016 to 2023, told trade publication Finanz-Szene that his trades were meant to protect downside risks to his personal stock portfolio and that he donated any additional profits to charity.
Chromik, who holds a doctorate in nuclear physics and started his career in banking at Postbank in 2004, briefly joined the board of UniCredit as a non-executive director after leaving Commerzbank.
Deutsche chief executive Christian Sewing praised Chromik’s “strong track record” and said that his “experience will help us to further strengthen our risk management capabilities at a time when the world economy is navigating a challenging environment”.
