British chief ready to cull 50,000 jobs at German bank

tHE British boss of deutsche Bank has warned he could slash nearly 50,000 jobs in a battle to get the troubled German lender back on track.

John Cryan said that his firm employs 97,000 people – adding that ‘most big peers have more like half that number’.

deutsche was once the world’s biggest investment bank but suffered badly during the financial crisis and has had a slow recovery since.

Cryan, a plain- speaking 56year- old Yorkshireman, has been battling to steady the ship since taking over in 2015.

this week he warned that technology could replace huge numbers of workers. ‘We’re too manual, which can make you error-prone and it makes you inefficient,’ he said. ‘there’s a lot of machine learning and mechanisation that we can do.’

the chief executive suggested that rather than just a hiring freeze, he had gone even further by imposing a ‘hiring frost’.

He added that money could also be saved if big banks pool resources for crime prevention. And Cryan is taking £800m of costs out of the lender’s retail banking network in Germany – echoing the wave of closures which has swept Britain.

He said that many of its Postbank outlets were rarely used.

the implosion in the eurozone created a huge challenge for deutsche, and it has also been hit with a succession of massive fines for wrongdoing.

Last year it was described by the international monetary Fund as the world’s most dangerous bank, with fears its collapse could pull down the global system. Cryan is overseeing a five-year plan to axe 9,000 permanent jobs and has already cleared out 4,000 of them.

Another 6,000 contractors are being laid off, while senior bankers have been forced to go without bonuses. the chief executive has repeatedly dropped hints that even this cost-cutting will not be enough.