‘The 2020s Will Be India's Decade'

Stefan Hoops, global head of Deutsche Bank’s newly-created corporate bank division, says India is growing quite nicely and it is one of the most exciting markets when one looks at innovations in the payments space.

- Sourav Majumdar

EMBATTLED GERMAN BANKING giant Deutsche Bank AG, which suffered a net loss of €3.1 billion in the quarter ended June, announced a radical overhaul of its operations in July this year. This saw the creation of a new division called ‘corporate bank’, which combines the transaction bank and its corporate clients business. The restructuring, which the bank’s CEO Christian Sewing called “the most fundamental transformation” of the bank in decades, has seen one key senior executive emerge as the focal point of Sewing’s new game plan for the future. As the managing director and global head of the newly-created corporate bank, 39-year-old Stefan Hoops is seen as critical to taking Deutsche Bank to better days. During a recent visit to India, Hoops, who holds a master’s in business administration and a PhD in economics from the University of Bayreuth, spoke to Fortune India on the bank’s broad game plan and how it views the Indian market. Edited excerpts:

Stefan, it’s a very vital portfolio you now hold at the bank, at a crucial time. How do you perceive India from the Deutsche Bank prism now, and what’s your India strategy?

Allow me to answer it a little broader, and then I’ll come to India. What we’ve done at Deutsche overall—of course we want to be in retail, so that was easy; of course we want to be in asset management, so that was easy. And then for the rest of our portfolio across the globe across our various products, we essentially defined a bunch of individual markets.