Deutsche Bank’s research division operates under an organisational structure that is materially different from most of its peers. The global head of research, David Folkerts-Landau, reports directly to group CEO Christian Sewing rather than into sales and trading, an arrangement with genuine consequences for what the division produces and how it does so.
Research is not accountable to a profit centre, is not subject to the commercial prioritisation that a sales and trading reporting line typically imposes and can maintain independent analytical positions even on clients and markets where the bank has significant commercial relationships.
When Deutsche Bank downgraded Germany’s GDP forecasts in October, citing inadequate structural reform despite being the country’s largest and most connected bank, that independence was tested against a concrete case and held.
That structural credibility provides the foundation for a research platform with genuinely global scope. The bank’s proposition – bringing Europe to the world and the world to Europe – reflects an organisational design principle rather than a marketing position.
The shift in geopolitics played directly to our strengths
Jim Reid
Approximately half of the Deutsche Bank Research Institute’s audience sits outside Europe, predominantly in the US and Asia, with Middle Eastern distribution in development. The global footprint is mirrored in the analyst team: a US economics desk led by Matt Luzzetti complemented by Matt Raskin, recruited from the Federal Reserve, whose institutional proximity to the body that sets the global risk-free rate has proven a differentiator for rates research clients.
Latin American coverage was expanded during the period, a decision that proved well-timed given the elevated focus on the Global South in a year of significant geopolitical realignment. A geopolitics specialist hired in Hong Kong extends the team’s capacity to provide localised analytical perspective across each major global region simultaneously.
Beyond conventional research
The importance of that architecture was tested in 2025 more acutely than most recent years. The US tariff announcements of April triggered a sustained 20% surge in client engagement that persisted for months – a function of the bank having the analytical infrastructure in place before the event rather than assembling a response to it. The ability to connect macro consequences of trade policy shifts with company-level implications across European sectors simultaneously requires the macro and equity franchises to be operating at equivalent depth, which limits the number of institutions that can credibly claim the capability.
The macro franchise is anchored by Jim Reid’s Early Morning Reid, a daily note approaching its 20th consecutive year of publication, reaching tens of thousands of institutional clients and an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 press contacts each morning at 6.45am.
Deutsche Bank research was referenced in between 30,000 and 40,000 press articles globally in 2025. The Mapping the World’s Prices study – a systematic cost-of-living analysis across global cities – was downloaded over 100,000 times and achieved broad public reach, generating coverage in virtually every major market.
Alongside it, publications on the long-term outlook for bitcoin versus gold as a central bank reserve asset, the long-term asset return study and the analysis of AI market dynamics demonstrated a thematic range that extends well beyond conventional sell-side research in both ambition and audience.
In equities, the Numis integration established Deutsche Bank as the provider with the broadest UK coverage among its top-tier peers, covering approximately 90% of London-listed investment companies by market cap at a moment when post-Mifid II unbundling has reduced small and mid-cap coverage across the industry.
Globally, the bank ranks in the top 10 for company coverage among all peers, with around 197 analysts across eight European countries alone. The combination of macro and company research operating at this level within the same institution is relatively uncommon and allows the team to translate top-down developments into company-level consequences in real time, across multiple geographies.
Technology investment is extending that analytical capacity. The dbLumina platform, developed through a strategic enterprise partnership with Google using the Gemini large language model, is operational across nearly 5,000 employees in the investment bank and includes clickable citation trails designed to preserve research integrity. Deutsche Bank is also a founding investor in Aiera, a distribution platform that applies AI to the challenge of making the bank’s approximately 30,000 annual research pieces queryable and actionable for clients.
The seniority and continuity of the team – Reid at 22 years, Mark Wall at over 30, George Saravelos more than 15 – provides analytical consistency that institutional clients and media contacts have come to rely on. The newly added geopolitical research team under Helen Belopolsky reached the top of client interaction rankings within weeks of joining, suggesting the market had identified the gap before the bank moved to fill it.
“The shift in geopolitics played directly to our strengths,” says Jim Reid, head of global macro research at Deutsche Bank. “Clients around the world recognised that our perspective – on Germany, on defence, on fiscal stimulus and what all of this means for markets globally – was something they could not get with the same depth elsewhere.”
