The integrated business has a notable feature: it operates on both the private and public sides of Deutsche Bank. Virtual ‘Chinese walls’ separate these sides to prevent misuse of material non-public information and require segregated office space, where assets are created, structured and listed (by issuers), which is bifurcated from the custody and safe keeping of those assets. An integrated TSS business makes it a conduit that bridges both private and public sides to service the whole asset lifecycle, while maintaining segregation, and servicing clients who themselves operate on both sides.
Maley explains: “On the private side of the wall, in our issuer services group, we are dealing directly with the Investment Bank and Capital Markets team, the M&A team, the Debt Capital Markets team, and private side components in structured finance within Fixed Income and Currencies (FIC). Whether those clients need an escrow partner, a loan agency partner, or any form of agent bank relationship; we’re the glue between those disparate groups. On the public side, as securities services, we’re dealing more often with the public side of our internal partners, such as the Institutional Client Group within FIC.”
On the public side, custody, fund administration and asset servicing teams work with institutional investors whose buying centres are different from those on the private side, even though there is often an overlap in the parent names of those clients. That separation requires dedicated public side sales and servicing teams working with other parts of the bank. Yet at the senior levels, those same clients expect a single relationship across the whole bank to bridge the lifecycle of an asset (see Figure 1). As Maley puts it, “They don’t want to deal with agent bank complexity issues… they want the bank to cover the lifecycle of asset creation and the transaction itself, then brought back together in terms of the client experience.”
Figure 1: Summary of asset lifecycle, with TSS providing a joined-up client experience
Another distinction of this approach, says Maley, lies in TSS’s proximity to the bank’s lending and structuring capabilities, and he sees the growth story in connecting these components together to benefit customers. The core banking capabilities are provided to corporate and institutional clients who need to raise capital, monetise or fund projects by creating an asset (a loan, note, securitisation, or structured instrument) and selling it to investors. These components are flanked by ancillary and complimentary businesses that also serve the whole value chain. That business’s global investor services network also connects with Deutsche Bank’s Institutional Cash Management services to help institutions manage their cross-border payments and liquidity.