Welcome all of you guys to the 27th edition of our German Equity Conference. It's pretty remarkable that we managed to do this over 27 years, and obviously, this conference went through quite a few changes over all of those years, as did the corporate and investment environment. We originally started here in Frankfurt 27 years ago. It was a very German-centric conference. Then we moved that conference to Berlin for political reasons, largely. We're very close to the German politicians. We expanded it to a DACH format over the years, and then post-COVID, we took it back to Frankfurt just to accommodate for this changed working environment that many of us live in today. And now, what we have here today is a really impressive lineup, and these type of things really only work if a lot of people work very well together.
So a big thank you to the conference team here on the ground specifically, but also everyone involved. To get you excited for the next two days, there's a couple of stats I'd like to throw at you. The first one is we have about 210 investors here, out of basically everywhere in the world. We have about 74 of the leading corporates that they are seeing meetings. And the one stat that I would like to leave you with for sure is that this team managed to organize 1,826 meeting requests. That's a pretty impressive number, I at least thought. And we have a couple of things that you can look forward to. There will be fireside chats in this room with all the major executives of the corporates attending this conference.
There will be panels next door with our CEO, Christian Sewing, and our previous Vice Chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, about Europe, specifically in geopolitics. There will be a panel on defense with RENK and Hensoldt, two companies that we helped bring into the stock market over the last years. There will also be a discussion with Jörg Kukies. Most of you guys know that very prominent figure in the German politics. And then last but not least, tonight, there's gonna be a panel with our partner for IT, Bernd Leukert, as well as the EMEA president of Microsoft, talking about the AI efforts of Microsoft, obviously involving ChatGPT and OpenAI. So all of this, you can look forward to over the next two days.
We at Deutsche Bank, we are all about client focus, front and center, and two of our most important client groups are here at this conference to connect to each other, investors and corporates. Therefore, I couldn't imagine a better discussion partner to open up this conference than Fabrizio, who oversees the Investment Bank and the Corporate Bank for us. Fabrizio looks back on an amazing career at Deutsche Bank over the last 20 years, ever since joining from McKinsey, and he will be joined on stage by Benjamin Goy, our Head of European Financials. And with that, I would say, Fabrizio, Ben, the stage is yours. Thank you very much.
Yes, so good morning, and warm welcome also from my side, and thanks for joining us, Fabrizio.
Thank you.
Tim already mentioned it. You are the head of the Corporate Bank and the Investment Bank, so the two businesses, you, you lead them, who have multiple touch points with the corporates and investors attending today. So indeed, it makes, it makes you ideally ideal candidate to start this conference with. Many of you will be familiar, if not, you will soon be, the format of this fireside chat, as well as, the sessions thereafter. We will start with a couple of questions from my side, and then we also open up to Q&A, from the room. So there's also time for that. We already heard we have many different companies from different industries attending, but one thing is typically a topic for every industry, every sector, is macro.
Why don't you start giving the framework how you see the world at the moment in this actually pretty unprecedented times and, more volatile times, actually?
Thank you. Thank you, Ben, and thank you all for being here. It is actually great to see the format of the conference being so different and continuously improving year- after- year. So I'm actually really excited about today. The macro environment, and speaking both to institutional clients, corporate clients, are kind of watching the markets, is interesting. Starting to show signs of improvement. We're starting to see those steps that we were all hoping to see coming through. We are seeing GDP growth stabilizing, inflation, which was double digit not so long ago, starting to really come into the much closer touching distance from our target levels, from central bank target levels. We're starting to see market activity regaining some confidence.
It's a market environment that is also showing great resilience relative to what we expected. You know, despite the significant interest rate hikes, we've seen that economies have remained strong, unemployment have remained at an all-time low, we're at 4% in the U.S., 6% in the EU, very low levels. The financial system has shown resilience. The fear that the most significant tightening of interest rates that we've seen in 40 years may break something in the financial sector actually didn't occur. Yes, there were some significant issues in pockets of the financial system, but really, at the end, it was in very contained ways. So all of this is positive and encouraging.
However, there are also some signs of concerns, and, and we see them, as still lingering, very much on people's minds. Partly, it's because it is obvious that, we've had two extraordinary shocks, within two years at a global level: the pandemic and everything that it entailed, the Ukraine invasion and how it changed, the balance of, some of our, key assumptions, particularly corporates assumptions around energy prices, supply chains, and so on. Those have caused our global GDP trend lines to be materially affected. We are still, about 1% below the pre-pandemic, GDP trend line in the U.S. and 5% below in Europe. Those are big, big, gaps to recover, the trends from. We're also seeing that, inflation is not entirely defeated.
We see that there is still a fair amount of risk, and that can rear its head up, depending on how things could play out from here. Geopolitics is still keeping people very worried, and it used to be very focused on Ukraine, Russia. Clearly, it's now extending with China and the U.S. continuously looking at the relationship, which is probably more constructive than a few months ago, but still kind of looking like in managed decline. We see the Middle East becoming more problematic with economic consequences, and the debt levels are at an all-time high. So these are all indicators that actually we're not out of the woods yet. There is some positive shoots, but there is still a lot of risk for downside.
So the sense I get, and even speaking to market participants, to investors, to our clients, there is a sense that it's really no time for complacency. Wherever we look, there could be a bounce back, particularly of inflationary pressures, that could put us under a lot of pressure. So while we have revised upwards some of our outlooks for GDP growth, and kind of we're quite constructive both on Europe and the U.S. and Germany on outlook, I think there are signals we watch very, very closely with some apprehension.
Yeah. I mean, you already mentioned parts of it. So when you look at geographically, you already mentioned that we are more positive in Germany, so much more a glass-half-full perspective. But a couple of more words on Germany, Europe, U.S., the broader environment, if you, if you want to go a bit more deeper in the regions.
Sure. So U.S., we see a growth level in 2024 comparable to 2023. This is kind of our economists are forecasting a 2.5% or so GDP growth level for this year. A bit lower next year, but still on a very positive trend line. So clearly, we went from being quite worried about a hard landing and a clear recession risk, to being much more constructive about the U.S. growth prospects and a normalization of interest rates properly happening over the course of the next year and a half, towards sometime kind of target inflation level reached in the U.S. around the mid-2026. With an unemployment level hovering around or maybe slightly above 4%, so a healthier state.
Clearly, the elections later this year could, in some way, alter the picture, depending on the extent to which there could be a change to the approach, particularly to fiscal policy, but this is kind of how we, how we see it. In Europe, again, more constructive. We, we see growth moving out of stagnation in Europe, probably still, you know, 0.5 percentage point of growth forecasted this year, but it's actually hiding the fact that the momentum, the trajectory, is quite positive. We expect the second half of 2024 to be a much richer growth opportunity, with exports rising, with Europe feeling healthier than it has been in the past. Germany, we have recently revisited our forecast again to the positive.
We see some positive momentum in Germany because a number of the dynamics that are playing out and a number of expectations we have, particularly on interest rates, would benefit Germany quite materially. We revisited our forecast for Germany to a barely positive GDP growth for 2024 of about 0.3%, this year, but with a few of the signs actually pointing to resilience and the trajectory recovering in the right direction.
Yeah. No, that's certainly good to hear. And the other big topic these days, on the last actually two and a half years, of course, interest rates. You mentioned it, inflation, you mentioned, that the last mile is a bit more challenging, potentially. So but what's your outlook for the interest rate environment, for the, for the big currency blocks?
Yeah. The this has kept us so busy, and at the beginning of the crisis, so after the pandemic and before Russia-Ukraine, DB had called for a clear inflation wave that would have led to very material hikes in interest rates. Once you make that call and you have conviction behind, then the rest of the narrative is laid out. The hikes will go to a certain level, terminal rates will be higher than the core inflation rate if you want to tame it. All of that proved right. Calling it the other way now of when we will see normalization is much, much harder, and so we are all watching this very closely. We all have our points of views, but it is clearly a much more difficult task.
In fact, we're seeing our investors, and our clients, and the markets having the same apprehension of, not seeing direction, not having that clarity, makes it much harder to call. In general, we would see it very unusual for the ECB to start moving before the Fed. Historically, they've done that less, yet we do expect that this will, this is what will happen this year. The ECB has too many indicators pointing to the fact that it may be the right time, probably soon, in the next month or so, to start easing. And that's because growth prospects in Europe are lower than what we've seen in the U.S..
All things equal, the U.S. is enjoying a much higher yield from productivity gains, so their growth push, the 2.5% GDP growth outlook we described earlier, has a lot to do with productivity, which Europe has not enjoyed. So the high interest rates are currently really holding Europe back in ways that the U.S. doesn't have. Hence, it would make more sense to see the ECB and possibly the Bank of England moving. We've already seen Sweden and Switzerland already acted, so the European environment is one that is probably more ready to do that.
Outlook terms, we expect the numbers to drop over the next, I would say, year and a bit until early 2026, maybe end of 2025, to a 2% kind of policy rate level for the ECB from the current level of around 4%.... The Fed is a bit more in trouble right now. The initial expectation that inflation was transitory was driven by a couple of indicators, which led the Fed to take their time in hiking, is actually playing out the other way around now. You know, what if those reductions of headline inflation levels are driven by some transitory effect, but actually core inflation is still a bit stubbornly sticking to higher levels?
In fact, we've seen that the last three prints have been heading in the right direction, but above expectation, and partly because there are some dynamics in the inflation levels that may suggest that there may be a sustained inflationary risk. The Fed has been very explicit about it, particularly the 4% unemployment level. They don't want to run the risk of easing and then having to hike again should there be a surprise. That would be a real problem. The risk of financial resilience problems, of something breaking in the financial sector, seems to be contained, so we do not expect the Fed to cut rates materially.
We went from expecting six cuts in 2024, to probably now only one in December this year, maybe two in the first half of next year, and perhaps three at the beginning of 2026. So from the 5.25 level that we're at right now, we probably expect to see a drop to, according to our research teams, 3.75 Fed funds rate level by sometime in the spring of 2026. Now, there's one dynamic, though, that I would like to highlight. I think the ECB will be watching this very closely. The risk of the ECB disconnecting its rates policy too far from the Fed is something that will worry many Europeans, and will certainly worry the ECB.
Because the risk of a weaker euro is contained if it's just a bit weaker than dollar. It becomes much more material if it becomes materially weaker. An excessively weak euro to the dollar may cause also inflation to pick back up, may cause some of the recovery to not work as well. Hence, I think, the outlook for 2025 for the ECB will be more complicated than the task at hand for this year.
Yeah. No, fair enough. Now looking at the two divisions, Corporate Bank and Investment Bank, how does it impact falling rates or higher for longer rates? How does it impact your businesses?
Yeah, these are. The Deutsche Bank has four divisions: Corporate Bank, Investment Bank, Private Bank, and Asset Management. I think the two most affected divisions are obviously the Private Bank and the Corporate Bank, because they have a very high reliance on net interest income. And given particularly euro the denominated deposits are very relevant for the Private Bank. The Corporate Bank has a better mix of currency, but euro is still a very important currency, and hence, the kind of European interest rates policy will have a very big bearing on the performance of the business. We've listened very carefully to what President Lagarde has said around the interest rates.
We'll probably have a phase of taking the edge off, as she expressed it a bit more elegantly, and only then a phase of normalization. I think that taking the edge off phase, that taking interest rates down once or twice over the course of this year, will likely result in a reduction of net interest income for our divisions. We have already seen it in Q1 of this year. The Corporate Bank has reduced its net interest income, and that was only partly offset by non-interest rate sensitive revenues coming into the division. And while it has been quite successful, that revenue substitution is a problem that is common to all the Corporate Bank and the Retail Banks.
There have been a few areas in which we have used the time wisely, as interest rates have picked up significantly and the deposit betas, the transfer of higher interest rates value to deposit holders was happening more slowly across the street than expected. That excess income has been invested in revenue streams on the non-interest sensitive parts of the business, which is now paying result on the payments infrastructure, merchant acquiring infrastructure, our Trust and Agency Services, which have a lot of fee commission rich parts of the business. So that is going to continue to be a key theme for us and other Corporate Banks.
At DB, that strategy is starting to pay out, and that's why we are seeing that overall, the performance of the business is kind of staying ahead of our original plans, despite deposit beta starting to bring the NII levels down further than expected.
No, makes sense, and we see that indeed across the industry, there's from net interest income shifting to non-interest income, ideally. Maybe zooming in a bit more on the Corporate Bank, other than the cyclical factors, as you mentioned, there's lots of structural investments going on. Could you speak a bit about multinational corporates? Corporate cash management is one of the growth areas we outlined for the segment, recent client wins. So yeah, basically, what the revenue streams are, in here and what the outlook is.
Sure. The division is kind of if you look at it, it has three large segments: the I nstitutional Treasury Services, the Corporate Treasury Services, and the Business B anking, which is kind of more the small cap business, typically here in Germany. The corporate treasury services has multiple components, corporate cash management being a very one, a very important one, a very strategic one for us. It is also at the center of the strategy that we pivoted Deutsche Bank to, as we announced our strategic realignment in 2019, of truly becoming a house bank to our corporate clients, a bank of reference across all the need: multi-solution, multi-product, multi-region.
The corporate cash management is a core business to us, not least because we are the number one corporate cash management bank in Europe, and the number three corporate cash management bank worldwide. The activity in this segment for us are focused on three things: becoming, again, a reference bank for deposit, deposit gathering, deposit management. In 2023, despite a couple of days of intense scrutiny on all banks, particularly regional banks in the U.S., and obviously Credit Suisse, and for a couple of days, even DB, our corporate cash management deposits were up 11% in 2023 full year, and in fact, we closed 2023 with deposits about EUR 300 billion, so a very large number.
I'm constantly checking in with Gerald, my CFO, but he's not nodding to tell me that the numbers I'm giving are correct. The other dynamic is one in which, as we expect those deposits to give us less revenues in the future, for all the reasons we discussed earlier, the substitution towards new revenue streams that speak to that corporate cash management role, that ability to be the bank of reference for corporate treasurers, have focused on cross-divisional solutions. For example, automation of treasury workflow solutions for effects, particularly in high currency controlled environments or emerging markets, currency pairs.
We have also invested much more significantly on solutions that support the activities of our corporates in new geographies, new corridors in which they had not operated before. This is as a result of the Russia-Ukraine crisis. We've seen a lot of companies rebuilding their supply chains to new geographies, and actually, we've been a very agile partners in following them towards those new areas. So all of these are areas in which we have been invested. We are continuously investing, and the result is very positive because we are seeing that the expectation we had of a materially reduced revenue base from the peak in 2023 is not materializing. Yes, we expect 2024 to have somewhat lower revenues than 2023, but to a more contained
the reduction will be more contained than we had initially expected, and judging on where we are today in May, properly, it will be less acute than what we had planned for.
Okay, that's good to hear. I mean, you mentioned, funding is in place. There's a strong deposit base. But still, what we haven't seen in Europe really is loan growth on the corporate side. Same in retail, but focusing more on the corporate side, do you think with rate cuts, you mentioned at least you expect for the ECB, that is getting better, or is it all about business confidence? And to your comment on the trade corridors, if you expect that, where do you see that picking up loan demand first, maybe?
Yeah. So the interest rates environment will be very beneficial mainly to Investment Banking businesses across the street. Corporate banks, Private Banks, will actually have a normalization of top lines, and so the trick will be all about revenue substitution towards new revenue streams, like I said, which are less interest income dependent, and therefore it would be a matter of investing in technology enablers, new front ends, new products, deposit gathering activities, the fee and commission part of that business. The lending business will remain somewhat muted across Europe for banks, particularly for a couple of reasons. One is, as I said, we're not out of the woods.
The interest rates higher for longer is means that, you know, we are still enjoying, to a certain extent, the effects of stimulus from the pandemic, but not only the effects of a material easing that banks have put forward in dealing with the refinancing requirements of companies, but interest rates are still very high, and a lot of refinancing is still owed. If we also think about the risk of some of these events actually causing interest rates to have to stay a bit longer, that could potentially put more strain. So the risk of the financial event still being out there is non-trivial. That's why we're seeing a lot of corporates being careful with their investment strategies, and therefore, their borrowing strategies. Demand has been more muted.
Supply has been more limited, particularly in Europe. I say particularly in Europe, because 70%+ of corporate funding in Europe is still bank dependent, so that is the main relationship to watch. You look at it in the U.S., there's a lot more bond borrowing that has picked up very dramatically this year. There's a lot more private credit activity in that market. There has been a very significant rotation of capital from banks that could actually drop their balance sheet through securitization, through government-sponsored entities, shed that risk from their balance sheet and keep the velocity of the balance sheet in the U.S., more active. So the dynamic are a bit disconnected. In fact, we see it from debt level.
In the U.S., we have debt levels have never been this high across the private and the public sector since World War II. Therefore, we don't expect in Europe that the debt product set, the credit levels, to pick up very significant. It will be steady growth, and I think to the extent that we start to see a normalization of interest anyway, we'd be left at interest rates which are—if we follow my forecast from before, 2%-ish in the Eurozone, still 2.5 percentage points higher than when people last had to finance. So it is a very significant change, which will ultimately reset somewhat those expectations.
Where I see big opportunities for the Corporate Bank is in those products that actually benefit from this kind of environment, trust products, the corporate trust services, in the Securities Services. People are looking to tap new pools of investments. We're seeing in the depositary receipts a significant pickup of activity. Depositary is a very large business for us in the U.S. We're seeing a lot of activity there as well. Those are all areas which are very good for us. They've extremely high return on equity. They basically don't consume capital, they enjoy fee and commission income, and they lean on decade-long experiences that the bank has.
One of the reasons why Deutsche Bank is so strong in corporate trust is because in the late 90s, we bought Bankers Trust in the U.S., and that is an expertise that has embedded in our Corporate Bank. So those are a few flavors of what we are, we're gonna watch in the future. The lending activity, as I said, particularly for corporate clients, will have to stay one to watch. By the way, if I can add one thing: in Germany, I think an easing of interest rates by the ECB could be quite beneficial from the perspective of lending. Because we have seen, particularly here, that there's been a substantial reduction of construction investment, of CapEx, that lower interest rates and more clarity in the refinancing world may make easier.
Okay. Well, that's good to hear. Now maybe moving to the Investment Bank, also here, I mean, you already made a comment on the cyclical environment for the Investment Bank, but probably even more interesting is the more structural initiatives and the growth initiatives. One that is actually pretty close to our heart, of course, is origination and advisory. We have seen hiring of teams of individuals, but also the Numis deal, which is, of course, close to our heart. So, any thoughts around that area...?
Sure. I mean, DB is a bank that has historically had an over-reliance on its Investment Banking businesses, and the strategy for the last few years was really to create this, global house bank, approach of being a bank of reference across banking needs, but with a Corporate Bank as a reference to our corporate clients. So that rebalancing of activities was very heavily predicated on growing faster, than Investment Banking revenues, all the non-Investment Banking revenues. That diversification strategy has to play out inside the Investment Bank as well. Historically, very high dependence on our FIC businesses, on our sales and trading businesses, rebuilding out our origination advisory, the corporate finance, products, was a very big priority.
Hence, in 2023, we spent a fair amount of resources really targeting weakness in the market and kind of timing it to a time when other banks were actually shedding capacity. We decided to actually build out capacity in that part of the business. That's the fee and commission, high return on equity part of the business, that can actually rebalance the mix between sales and trading and non-sales and trading activities. It's working quite well. The investments we've made increased the footprint of our corporate finance senior bankers by about a quarter. It was spread across the world, about 40%-45% in Europe, 35%-40% in Americas, and about 15%-20% in Asia.
We've made a very deliberate effort to build out sectors that needed to be picked up. So we made a bet not on trying to be across all sectors, all products, all geographies, the league table top of the league table bank, but we actually picked our spots where we believe we can do most for our clients. That strategy is starting to show results. Numis was a shortcut. We were very light, particularly on the corporate broking, which is a very particular feature of the U.K. market, big enabler to the corporate finance activities. We were lighter. Numis shortcuts our ability to tap into that market very effectively, the largest corporate finance market in the European time zone.
It's a quarter of all fees paid in corporate finance are paid in the U.K. So for us, this was an important market not to miss on as a European Investment Banking champion. And the results, I think, are showing. In Q1, we were 55% up year-on-year in the first quarter on revenues for origination advisory, 65% up quarter-on-quarter, comparing it to December. If I look at Q2, I think we're seeing that that momentum is not abating, so we're feeling quite good about that business. FIC, however, is also a business in which we're focused on, and we want to again continue to invest in diversification.
That's a business that has much more cyclicality, in parts of it, but that cyclicality tends to even out, depending on which part of the business you look at. So for us, it was important to protect the areas of FIC in which we're really strong. We're one of the leading FIC financing businesses, the number one FX business, number three global rates business. When those suffer from, cyclical pressure, having a strong credit trading business, for example, is key. And so we've invested in flow credit, and now we're seeing the result. We have now a FIC business, which is, call it, around EUR 8 billion in revenues, a third of which is financing, so banking book, highly predictable revenues, very high return on tangible equity business.
The rest is a sales and trading business in the fixed income and currency space, which used to be historically very concentrated around one or two engines, with a lot of smaller businesses around. Now, that portfolio has four roughly equal, there are a couple that are slightly bigger, but much more balanced businesses, which can really complement each other when we see some stress in parts of them. For example, this year we are seeing that all that uncertainty in interest rates is causing some headaches to the rates business, and so having the rates business perform a little bit less is not that big a problem when we have FX financing global emerging markets and the credit trading businesses all actually performing to expectation.
That diversification strategy is the key of our investment in 2023, and we expect the results to continue to show for FIC in 2024 and beginning of 2025, and for the origination advisory all the way through to 2026.
Okay, so lots going on at the, but at a headline level, relatively, and good outlook. I mean, you mentioned fixed income financing, and I think it's which we recently improved the disclosure on. Because fixed income there can be this, this misconception, it's very volatile, it's, but there is also financing business. We have been strengthening that, as you mentioned. What was the role of the growth focus you mentioned? What was the role of credit rating agency upgrades, which we also saw? And, yeah, clients coming back, maybe, maybe a bit more on the financing side of things.
Yeah. I mean, interestingly, the credit rating upgrades of DB really helped us on the sales and trading business. This is where, particularly on the non-cleared businesses, like in the FX, you build a pipe to a bank, and then you post margin to that bank, and having a credit rating that kept improving for us meant that more and more clients came back to DB. We had to do nothing, just sit there, and we had more clients come back to us that felt that, according to their charters, according to their credit policies, as the credit rating came back, we've seen a steady return to performance there. The FIC financing business is a business that in itself is quite diversified. It's a global business. It's asset-backed. It's always recourse-focused.
It's diversified by asset classes. It includes commercial real estate, but includes also many other lending elements that are performing really quite strongly. In an analysis we carried out internally of which were the most stable businesses over 15 years at DB, on a return on equity basis, this was one of the ones that was ranking the highest, and partly because the strategy of the business, the mandate of the business, and the leadership of the business have remained remarkably stable for the last 25 years. I've been at the bank 20 years, so the number of people that have joined before me are becoming fewer and fewer, and the
That business, that team, is one that actually has some of the longest tenure, and they've been very consistent at keeping the discipline in that, in that business. I think in general, discipline is probably one way to interpret what is going on in the Investment Bank. Discipline on resources, on expenses, on risk-taking, has been a key feature, and it has paid off. We've seen it even in the difficult times, for example, when we have started to see losses, in the leverage finance sector globally, in the commercial real estate sector globally. One of the things we always watch very closely is, are our share of losses that we can measure higher or lower than our market share in that business over the cycle?
You know, it gives us great comfort that actually those losses that everybody incurred, including DB, are always lower than our share of market, which means, you know, we have good underwriting standards, and that's one of the features of that financing business.
Yeah. Sounds good. Maybe one last from my side, and then we open up to the floor. Now bringing all together all the growth initiatives you mentioned, the cyclic environment, how do the Corporate Bank and the Investment Bank contribute to our house bank strategy, our 2025 targets, and also maybe if you want to link that to capital return, which is clearly an important feature for the, for the industry?
I think those two businesses are key. They represent today around, call it 60% of the top line of the bank. They are a very central part to the narrative we have put forward around the strategy, which is aimed at putting the client at the center of Deutsche Bank and being engines for a much, much deeper level of collaboration for our clients. Those are key features of the strategy and a key feature of our enabler of that client strategy I just outlined. Collaboration is key, and DB comes from a history of having run itself more on a product basis, and in the last few years, certainly with the house bank strategy, the intent is to become much better at embracing clients across their needs.
For the first time in 2023, as an example, when we look at our Corporate Bank, we had 80% of our transaction banking clients that came to DB for more than one product, which speaks to our ability to actually start to look at these clients in a much, much more holistic way. You mentioned Numis as a great example of a company we bought that didn't have a Corporate Bank, didn't have an international network, didn't have a fixed income arm, didn't have a Private Banking arm, and we're now seeing that one of the big benefits is not just the origination advisory, what that business does, but the ability to connect that bank with the rest of the bank in itself is, has proven to be a very substantial value creator.
So the strategy that the bank is pursuing has those two businesses right at the heart of it. One of the biggest enabler of revenues in the last two years in the Corporate Bank has been a cross-divisional product, which is this automation of workflow tools for treasurers. When a treasurer need to send money or extract money from a high currency control environment, Vietnam, the paperwork needed, the filing requirements are quite manual. Often they require local accountants, local tax experts, and if our technology across the Corporate Bank, the fixed income department, our tech department, can automate that workflow entirely for a small fee, the treasurer doesn't need to worry about anything. We can take care of that workflow for them, which is really a workflow.
It's actually making sure you follow the right steps and the right filing and the right paperwork. That is something that can only be achieved if the bank collaborates in ways that historically it wasn't doing, and that is resulting in really great outcomes. The last example is the one that resonates the most with people who look at DB and have been looking at DB for a long time. We've put a much greater emphasis on product density. Historically, we had many clients, 50% of our clients, that were purchasing one or two products from the bank. If you become the bank of reference, by definition, they would be more inclined to buy more from us, three, four, five products.
We have seen that at times in which there is uncertainty in the market, corporate clients, in particular, tend to concentrate much more of their people around fewer banking counterparties. They want to have people that know their story, so they don't need to re-explain it too many times. The unbundling happens when the market are really buoyant, but there tends to be a reconcentration when markets are more uncertain. That product density is a major opportunity. They have the same product, the same clients, the same coverage officers, but we can achieve a lot more by having them collaborate much more together. So a lot of investment is going into centering that strategy for the bank, much more around that collaboration. What does this all mean? It means that we have great conviction around our 25 targets that we put out.
I think we will have the kind of increased CAGR on the revenue side, which we upped from our original 2020 communication to the levels that we are communicating right now, around 5.5%. We're seeing that steadily progressing in the right direction towards the €32 billion revenues we're targeting in 2025 for the group. A 62.5% cost-income ratio, which is the target we had out there for the bank, is at reach if we do all the things I described, which would translate in a 10%+ return on tangible equity for the bank in 2025. That's one of the key things we focus on.
All of this is built towards being able to return capital to our shareholders in the various forms that we've communicated, dividends and share buybacks, and the conviction we have behind being able to staying on track on that remains high.
Yeah. In great conviction into 2025 targets, normally a nice sentence to finish, but I promised you there's also the opportunity to ask questions. So maybe I think we have time for one question. If you could raise your hand, and then we'll get you a mic. Yes, please, in the front.
I was trying to end on a high note, so I'm very hopeful on the question.
I'll try and deliver for you. Jonathan Gerrard from Deutsche Bank. You talked about the newest acquisition plugging a hole in the portfolio. Do you see other opportunities across the portfolio for further acquisitions, or do you think the next two, three years is gonna be more about organic growth?
Thank you. The focus of the bank is to continue to deliver on organic basis. The bolt-on acquisition was an opportunity that presented itself, and should we see other really attractive bolt-on opportunities, of course, we will take a look. But the core of the strategy and the targets outlined are really built onto delivering organically, as we should do, given where we are still trading on a price to tangible book basis. It is better currently to deliver through our own strengths rather than tapping kind of external opportunities. Like I said, we can never say never, and it would be unwise to just put the blinders on and not look at those options.
Right now, the bulk of what we're focused on as a management team is predicated on organic delivery.
Perfect. Right on time. Thanks, everyone. Thanks. Thank you, Fabrizio, for setting the scene.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you.