The Unofficial Guide to Banking

Assets Under Management is how much money a company is managing. This key metric tells you how big the company is compared to others. It can also be used for calculating management fees.

This is typically a financial asset, such as stocks and bonds, that can be converted to cash within a short timeframe. It’s often found in both active and passive investment strategies.

This tends to be a higher-risk asset that cannot easily be sold or exchanged for cash, due to lower trading activity or interest. These types of assets are often a part of alternative investment strategies, such as real estate or investments made in private companies.

This is a very important part of risk management strategy. Asset managers will often invest in different types of assets – at higher and lower levels of risk – to ‘diversify’ the portfolios they handle and minimise risk.

The yield is the amount of money that is earned on an investment. For shares, it’s the annual dividend payment. For property, it’s the rental income as a percentage of the total value of the property. For bonds, it's the annual interest as a percentage of what they are worth at any given time.

Environmental, Social & Governance factors are criteria by which a potential investment can be assessed. Companies, for example, are measured by their ethical standards such as operating policies as well as their environmental and community impact.

This refers to stock being under-priced or over-priced relative to the outlook for a particular company, where the fundamentals may be either better or worse than competitors. A range of techniques are used to assess valuation.

A ‘Bull’ is an investor who expects prices to rise. A ‘Bear’ is an investor who expects prices to fall.

A primary offering is when a private company taps the markets to raise money. A secondary offering is when an existing public company raises more money from investors.

Bonds are a financial instrument whereby companies and governments issue debt in order to raise funds. These bonds will have a set duration and provide the buyer with interest for their investment.

A coupon or coupon payment is the annual interest rate paid on a bond, expressed as a percentage of the face value, and paid from the issue date until maturity. Coupons are usually referred to in terms of the coupon rate, which is the sum of coupons paid in a year divided by the face value of the bond in question.

Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) is a method for analysing the combination of debt and equity that is the most cost-effective for the funding needs of a company.

Marketing a potential transaction to investors in more than one physical location, while accompanied by senior management from the company (or conducting these same meetings on a virtual basis).

In a leveraged buyout (LBO), one company acquires another, relying primarily on debt to pay for the acquisition. The idea is to cheapen the cost versus relying on equity or cash. It may result in higher returns if the value of the company increases.

An IPO is the process by which the shares of a private company are made available to the public for the first time – also known as ‘listing’ the shares on a stock exchange. Companies do initial public offerings to raise capital or allow shareholders to cash out their investments.

A graphic included in a marketing presentation, traditionally in a box or ‘tombstone’ format, to highlight recent successful transactions in a related area to provide evidence of why a bank should be chosen.

Investment Banks like Deutsche Bank come under the umbrella of ‘sell side’ firms. On this side of the financial market, firms deal with the creation and selling of public and private securities to those on the ‘buy side’ of the industry.

Hedge funds, pension funds, and asset managers are all on the buy side. They raise money from investors and invest in securities across various asset classes.

The public side of an Investment Bank is home to sales, trading, structuring, and research professionals who only deal with publicly available information. The public side will often have business areas split via asset classes. An asset class is a grouping of investments (like stocks, bonds, real estate for example).

When traders put a price on a specific financial product, there are two separate facets to the price. The ‘bid’ is the price at which a trader in the bank is prepared to buy the security (from a participant on the buy side). The ‘ask’ is the price at which a trader in the bank is prepared to sell it. (sometimes called the ‘offer’.)

The term ‘securities’ once referred to paper certificates sent to investors as proof of an investment. Today, it’s used more broadly as a way of describing the most common types of investments – from stocks and shares to commodities like oil and gold, and bonds.

Covenants are stipulations and conditions set by lenders that borrowers must adhere to during the loan term, designed to protect the lender's interests and ensure borrower stability.

In private credit, syndication refers to a group of lenders (a syndicate) pooling their resources to provide a loan to a single borrower, often for larger deals or when a single lender's risk appetite is insufficient.

Anti-Money Laundering refers to the policies, laws, and regulations implemented to prevent financial crimes.

Enterprise risk management is what a company does to manage business risks.

Know Your Customer – this is all about having enough data and information to understand how customers behave and to identify any suspicious activity on their accounts.

EBITDA stands for ‘Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortisation.’ It measures profitability and company performance – and it’s calculated by adding interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization expenses to net income.

This framework outlines internal audit’s role in assuring the effective management of risk. The first line of defence includes functions that own and manage risk, while the second line is functions that deal with compliance, and the third is functions that provide independent assurance.

As the name suggests, UHNW individuals are some of the world’s richest people – they hold investable assets totalling at least $30 million.

Wealth planning is about understanding client objectives and planning strategies designed to help protect, grow, and effectively manage a client’s wealth.

ESG are the three factors that determine how sustainable a company is. It includes looking at the environment, social governance, and financial performance – providing guidance on what will happen to a company's finances.

DPM is when a portfolio manager or investment counsellor makes decisions about what to buy or sell with a client’s money.

CBV is a measurement of a client’s business that takes invested assets, sight deposits, and loans into consideration.

Bank branches are set financial targets by head office. They try to meet these by making money on the products sold – all while providing excellent customer service.

POA is when someone is given third-party control over an account.

Retail banks are an important source of credit for people. Providing loans, credit cards, and mortgages is important because it helps the economy to grow through larger purchases, like cars and houses.

AML is about understanding and recognising the techniques criminals will use to gain benefit from the money they make from their crimes.

An automated physical movement of cash to and from different subsidiary bank accounts into one, centralised ‘header’ bank account on a domestic, regional, or global level. It enables treasurers to benefit from better visibility of cash and simplify cash management structures while avoiding overdrafts and other fees.

The provision of agency services and other related services to support activity in debt capital markets.

An LC is a letter from a bank guaranteeing that a buyer's payment to a seller will be received on time and for the correct amount. If the buyer is then unable to make a payment on the purchase, the bank will be required to cover the full or remaining amount of the purchase.

A securities collection and distribution service provided by financial institutions. The institution collects dividends, proceeds, and interest from customers’ security sales before distributing them on their behalf.

Events related to holding security. This could include dividends, coupon payments, bonus issues, and takeovers. These can be mandatory (e.g. dividends) or voluntary (e.g. takeovers).

The training of computers, using AI and LLMs, to learn from data to spot trends and make predictions. Banks can develop ML models to understand customer behaviour, detect fraud, and automate tasks.

AI enables computers to perform tasks or solve problems typically undertaken by humans. Used carefully, AI can help make data-backed decisions, improve efficiencies, and enhance the customer experience.

A very large volume of information that is difficult to process using traditional methods. This data can be used to analyse trends and work toward improving customer satisfaction through methods like personalised suggestions.

Applying the principles of quantum physics, quantum computers have power to process data millions of times faster than even the fastest supercomputer. This opens up endless opportunities to enhance efficiency in banking.

Cloud computing allows users of global banks to access new and upgraded software wherever they’re based, eliminating the need for large, costly IT infrastructure. The speed at which banks can evaluate and adopt new tools and applications can also be greatly increased.

A system that records information in a way that makes it difficult to change, hack, or cheat the system. It's like a digital ledger of transactions. Each block in the chain contains many transactions. Every time a new transaction occurs, it has to be updated everywhere at once.

Information collected on our website will only be retained for as long as necessary to fulfil the purpose for which it was collected. If you wish to access or correct any information Deutsche Bank AG holds about you, you may have your data deleted, blocked or corrected (as long as compliant with applicable law). You have the right to access the personal information we hold about you; this service is free of charge.

• Data tracking
  Tracking information includes details of the originating page that you used to access the Deutsche Bank website including the search requests you may have made when using a search engine. Details of the Deutsche Bank websites you visited and which search terms you may have used on the website are also collected, as well as additional information about website errors, website scrolling and the volume of data transferred between your browser and the web server.
• Length of stay
  We record the duration of your visit by processing when your visit started and came to an end as well as the network activity time, pop-up display time and the time that any errors occurred.
• Pseudonymised IDs
  Your pseudonymised IDs (uniquely identifiable number combinations) are stored In order to identify you as a repeat visitor to our website.
• Session information
  Besides temporary session IDs, with which your visit can be assigned via several subpages, your session information also includes the duration of the session.
• Campaign information
  Campaign information comprises the advertising media you have clicked on, where it is located and which marketing campaign it belongs to.
• Loading times
  The information collected includes the time taken for images and the whole website to load, as well as the time at which the website was loaded completely and the time spent on the website.
• Location information
  Where available, we collect information about the postcode, town, country, longitude, latitude and time zone of your visit.
• System information
  The information about the system with which you visit the website, including the display resolution, the operating system and browser used, network and connection information, the end device used, information about cookies, flash and JavaScript as well as the language setting, your domain, the IP address (shortened) and where applicable your organisation (if available)
  We use the information collected on our websites to compile user profiles using pseudonyms. These pseudonymised user profiles do not allow any of your personal details to be identified. You can opt out of your information being collected by using the “Analytics & Re-Marketing Opt-out” link further down this page. Without your explicit consent this tracking information will not be combined with your personal information.

Information input collected through this website will be transferred to the responsible Deutsche Bank AG division. Banking secrecy as well as confidentiality are maintained. Data will not be transferred to third parties, unless necessary to answer your queries (i.e. leaflets dispatched by vendors). Your information is used to exclusively fulfil the purpose for which it is collected, relating to the website through which it is collected.
Websites through which we collect your information are usually encoded using the encryption module of your browser. These sites are certified by renowned institutions for international encryption technique, analogous to Deutsche Bank’s Internet Banking. Moreover, Deutsche Bank AG put in place additional and comprehensive state-of-the-art security measures when both accounts and custody accounts are accessed via the Internet. Firewalls prevent unauthorized access.
Diverse encryption and identification layers protect customer information from intrusion or disclosure to third parties during data transfer. Furthermore, Deutsche Bank AG internally uses sophisticated encoding methods in order to prevent de-coding by unauthorised persons. Moreover, an electronic identifier is generated during data transfer to safeguard your information.

In addition to this website-specific privacy notice, further data privacy information, as required by the EU General Data Protection Regulation under A. X. in German and English.

Our website uses social plugins (“plugins”) from the social networking sites Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and XING. If you access a Deutsche Bank website using such a plugin, your browser will contact the server of the underlying social networking site, load the visual presentation of the plugin, and present it to you.
While this is happening, the social networking site receives information concerning your visit to our website, as well as further data such as your IP address. In order to ensure an appropriate level of data privacy in connection with our internet presence, we have deactivated the respective plugins with a button and placed a short data privacy note that can be consulted before a plugin is activated.
Our website also contains links to the social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, XING or YouTube. We have no influence on the data that social networking sites collect via an active plugin or via a link. For more information, please consult the relevant data privacy notice:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Xing
• Youtube

In view of the importance of data privacy, and our obligations of transparency, we provide information below about cookies, how we use them on our website.
What are cookies?
Cookies are small text files that are sent to your computer to ensure the technical functionality of the website. Deutsche Bank uses cookies in some areas of its web pages to make it easier for you to use the pages and to make them more personalized.
What are cookies?
When trying to understand cookies, it can help to know following terminology:

• Cookies installed on your device by the organization running the website you are visiting are known as “first party” cookies.
• Cookies installed on your device via the website you are visiting by another organization are termed “third party” cookies. An example is a cookie set by a specialist website analytics company that provides the website owner with data on the numbers of people visiting its website (Cookies for range and usage analysis).
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What cookies do we use?
This website only uses cookies that are necessary for the technical functionality of our website and the recognition of errors and security relevant conspicuous features or to offer a service or functionality requested by you; e.g. a cookie that "remembers" your personal settings such as selected language or similar. Marketing cookies and other cookies requiring your consent are not used on this site.
The following technically necessary cookies are used.

How to control cookies
Some cookies allow you to take full advantage of the functionality of our website. In order to offer certain functionalities, certain technically necessary cookies can be used to display these functionalities correctly.
You can set your web browser to disable cookies. Please note that most browsers offer different ways to protect your privacy. If you do not activate or deactivate certain cookies via the browser settings, it is possible that certain functionalities will not be available to you as expected. For example, you can allow first-party cookies, but block third-party cookies, or receive a notification each time a website wants to install a cookie.
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If you feel that the above is not sufficient or if you have any queries as regards the collection, processing or use of your information we are looking forward to hearing from you. We will make every effort to reply as soon as possible and take into consideration any suggestions from your end.
For inquiries about the personal data of yours that we hold, please use the following PDF German language form(PDF) or contact us at data.privacy@db.com.