It's results time for Deutsche Bank and for UBS. Deutsche Bank's results are available here. UBS's results are available here. If you lack the time to study each bank's release in detail, this is what you need to know.
In the first quarter of 2013, UBS achieved a massive 50% return on attributed equity in its investment bank. It generated 20% more revenues than during the first quarter of 2012, using around 10% less balance sheet and with around 15% fewer people in the front office. The cost income ratio in UBS's investment bank was 65%, down from 78% last year and was one of the best in the industry.
All of this follows UBS's decision last October to slash 10,000 jobs in three years and to pull back significantly from fixed income sales and trading.
UBS is cutting 10,000 jobs and its expects its total headcount to be 54,000 by 2015. At the end of the first quarter, headcount at UBS was 61,782, so that's another 7,782 job cuts to go.
Many of the redundancies are expected to hit the investment bank. 1,051 jobs were cut in the investment bank during the first quarter.
UBS isn't just cutting staff, it's also shifting them between business areas. 400 people were reallocated into wealth management. 650 people were reallocated out of the investment bank.
Having pulled back from fixed income, revenues in UBS's fixed income sales and trading business have fallen nearly 60%, to CHF619m. This doesn't appear to have impacted the bank's equities sales and trading business, however - revenues there are up 17% year-on-year in the first quarter.
Andrea Orcel's M&A bankers aren't doing so well. M&A revenues at UBS fell 33% in the first quarter (at Goldman Sachs they were down 1%, although at Deutsche they were down 43%). However, equity capital markets revenues at UBS rose an impressive 152% over the same period.
In the first quarter, pay per head at UBS's investment bank was CHF101k. This was up from the CHF91k per head paid by UBS last year and was considerably more than the CHF76k per head that was on offer at Credit Suisse in the first quarter.
Some of this money may be due to severance payments, however.
Last July, Deutsche Bank said it was making 1,500 redundancies in its corporate and investment bank. Today, the bank said these are 'materially complete.'
Nonetheless, Deutsche still has a lot more cost cutting to go. Slide 10 of the bank's results presentation reveals that only €600m of costs have been taken out of the investment bank, compared to a target of €4.5bn by the end of 2014.
In the first quarter of 2013, Deutsche paid the average person its corporate and investment bank €63k. In the first quarter of 2012, Deutsche paid the average person in its corporate and investment bank €63k. In other words, pay is completely static.
Deutsche employs 27,592 people in its corporate and investment bank, of whom 8,792 work in the front office. Over the past twelve months, front office headcount was cut by 12% while total headcount across the corporate and investment bank was cut by 6.5%, suggesting front office bankers were being disproportionately eradicated.
Redundancies became more evenly focused in the past quarter, however: 2.8% of the front office bankers were cut at Deutsche Bank, compared to 2% of all employees.
Fixed income sales and trading revenues at Deutsche Bank were static between the first quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013. However, Deutsche said it had been a bad quarter for rates trading, particularly in European rates as 'as macroeconomic uncertainty impacted client activity.' Other banks have said much the same thing.
Deutsche Bank had a good quarter in equities, with revenues up 25% quarter-on-quarter. Best of all was equity derivatives, where Deutsche said it achieved 'significantly higher revenues y-o-y driven by strong performance in Europe and especially in Asia.'
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