Starting in October, Michael Diederich will take over as global co-head of the Deutsche Bank Corporate Bank unit, leading it jointly with David Lynne. Lynne has headed the division since Stefan Hoops moved to the top of asset management subsidiary DWS. According to Deutsche Bank, Diederich will be based in Frankfurt and focus particularly on Germany. He will report to Fabrizio Campelli, the management board member responsible for the Corporate Bank and Investment Bank.

Diederich is currently still serving as Chief Financial Officer of Germany’s most successful football club, FC Bayern Munich, where, as acting CFO and deputy CEO, he was seen as the heir apparent to the CEO position currently held by Jan-Christian Dreesen. Both men share a similar career path, which, in addition to the CFO role at the club, also includes a senior management position at HypoVereinsbank, part of Italy’s UniCredit Group. But now their paths are diverging again: Dreesen is firmly in the saddle at Bayern, while Diederich is heading back into the banking sector.

This gives Deutsche Bank an experienced corporate banker who joined the former Vereinsbank AG in the mid-1990s and then built his career at HypoVereinsbank. In 2015, he joined the management board, taking responsibility for investment banking. In 2018, he became CEO, and was a member of the Group Executive Committee of UniCredit in Milan. In a 2023 he moved to FC Bayern. His successor at HVB, Marion Höllinger, continues to lead the bank to this day.

For Deutsche Bank, the appointment is a coup, not only because the former HVB banker Diederich has strong ties to Germany’s Mittelstand, but also because he is actually a German speaker. This has been lacking at the management board level in recent years, a point that has repeatedly drawn criticism in the market. The highest-ranking German-speaking corporate banker at Deutsche Bank, who is also based in Germany, is Europe head Jan Philipp Gillmann, but he does not sit on the management board.

But even with its many English-speaking executives, Deutsche Bank’s business is currently thriving. At the end of July, Germany’s largest financial institution reported its best quarterly result since the financial crisis, at 1.7 billion euros, beating analysts’ expectations. This, however, was due less to the corporate client business than to trading activities.

In the Corporate Bank, revenues in the first half of the year slipped slightly by 1% compared with the previous year to around 3.8 billion euros. The fact that pre-tax profit still rose by 13% to roughly 1.4 billion euros was due to costs being 4% lower, totaling about 2.3 billion euros in the first half.

Deutsche Bank noted that David Lynne has steered the Corporate Bank onto a growth path in recent years. With Diederich on board, the bank is better positioned to serve its corporate clients.