Anshu Jain, who took Deutsche Bank to Wall Street, dies at 59

NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - Mr Anshu Jain, who helped transform Deutsche Bank from a conservative middle-market lender in Germany into a Wall Street giant and who eventually became its first non-European chief executive, died last Saturday (Aug 13) in London, where he lived. He was 59.

The cause was cancer of the intestines, his family said in a statement.

Mr Jain, who joined Deutsche Bank in the mid-1990s, helped build the bank's Wall Street businesses - not only advising companies but also trading in the complex financial products whose sudden collapse in value in 2008 set off the global financial crisis.

He took over as co-CEO in 2012, just as Deutsche Bank was making a series of real estate loans to Mr Donald Trump, providing funds that allowed him to refinance a skyscraper in Chicago, buy a golf resort in Florida and renovate the Old Post Office Building in Washington, his last big venture before running for president.

Mr Jain resigned in 2015 after a downturn in Deutsche Bank's fortunes, caused largely by the increasingly complex activities he and his fellow executives had promoted. Even as other banks had tried to simplify and pare down their investment businesses after the 2008 crisis, Mr Jain had pressed on, to the bank's ultimate detriment.

Anshuman Jain was born in January 1963 in Jaipur, India, and reared by parents who followed Jainism, an Indian religion whose precepts include doing no harm to any living thing. The family was vegetarian, a diet to which Mr Jain adhered throughout his life. His parents were intellectuals, avid bridge players and, as Mr Jain's wife Geetika put it, "obsessive newspaper readers".

Mr Jain's father, Mr Ambuj Jain, worked for the Indian Audit and Accounts Service, a government agency, which posted him to a new place every three years. He attended Shri Ram College of Commerce in Delhi, where he met Ms Geetika.

After graduating, he followed her and her family to the United States. At 20, he received a master's degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Mr Jain began his financial career at securities firm Kidder, Peabody & Co, but soon moved to Merrill Lynch.

He initially faced a tough environment at Merrill whose members were "repeatedly mistaking him for an IT guy", according to Mr David Enrich, a business reporter and an editor for The New York Times, who wrote Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump And An Epic Trail Of Destruction.

But Mr Jain excelled as a derivatives salesman and soon became one of the youngest-ever managing directors at the firm. In 1995, at 32, he was one of a group of young Merrill superstars who were lured away to Deutsche Bank by the founder of Merrill's derivatives business.

At Deutsche Bank, he established a reputation as an expert in the burgeoning world of hedge funds. He often pushed for more freedom to do new things at greater speed, lobbying his bosses to approve trades without presenting them to the risk committee at the bank's headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany.

As he ascended to increasingly powerful positions in Deutsche Bank's investment bank, eventually becoming its chief, Mr Jain built a cadre of loyal underlings who became known within the bank as "Anshu's army". Their path to power and wealth was smoothed by Deutsche Bank's aggressive efforts to weaken German banking regulations and limit oversight of the bank's operations.

The trades that Mr Jain made popular earned the bank billions of dollars. In the lead-up to the 2008 crisis, his team was one of very few on Wall Street that bet that the prices of mortgage-backed securities would fall, a triumph of foresight that belonged squarely to Mr Jain, said Mr David Folkerts-Landau, Deutsche Bank's global head of research, who worked with Mr Jain for 20 years.

In 2012, Mr Jain and German banker Jurgen Fitschen were appointed co-CEOs. Deutsche Bank was by then so powerful that its leaders were sometimes viewed as quasi-governmental, exerting strong influence over German politicians.

In 2014, Deutsche Bank reported it had spent more than US$460 million the previous year on legal fees to handle 6,000 lawsuits and investigations over allegations of misconduct and oversight failures. On Mr Jain's watch, the bank, along with other Wall Street firms, was caught manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, which is used to set interest rates for trillions of dollars of consumer loans.

The bank agreed to pay US$2.5 billion in penalties to American and British regulators to settle the matter in 2015. The authorities later accused the bank of helping Russian clients launder money from 2011 to 2015.

By mid-2015, Mr Jain could no longer withstand the criticism from shareholders, regulators and the public over the bank's sinking share price and its multitude of regulatory troubles. He stepped down, and a new co-CEO, Mr John Cryan, was appointed.