Raphael Stevens

Chongqing’s mountainous, cyberpunk panoramas and sticky summer heat seem worlds away from flat and dry Detroit. But carmakers in the Chinese metropolis cannot stop drawing parallels with the American city. Standing outside one of Chongqing’s sprawling car-assembly plants, a boss at Changan, a state-owned auto giant, notes with pleasure that the sheer number of cars being produced in the city—some 2.5m last year—has earned it the moniker “Motown of China”. More

Deutsche Bank’s net profit reached 1.485 billion euros ($1.748 billion) in the second quarter, compared with a 1.2 billion forecast from Reuters.
The firm’s core investment banking unit reported a 3% year-on-year hike in revenue to 2.687 billion euros in the June quarter.

Illustration shows the logo of Deutsche Bank Brussels, Saturday 25 March 2023.
Nicolas Maeterlinck | Afp | Getty Images

Deutsche Bank on Thursday beat expectations on the bottom line and said it was on track to meet full-year targets, despite mixed results within its key investment banking unit and euro gains against the U.S. dollar.
Net profit attributable to shareholders reached 1.485 billion euros ($1.748 billion) in the second quarter, versus a 1.2 billion forecast from Reuters. It compares with a loss of 143 million euros in the June quarter of 2024, when earnings were hit by legal provisions linked to Deutsche Bank’s takeover of Postbank.

The lender’s revenues over the period came in at 7.804 billion euros, in line with a mean analyst forecast of  7.76 billion euros produced by LSEG.

Deutsche Bank Chief Financial Officer James von Moltke told CNBC’s Annette Weisbach in a Thursday interview: “The setup in terms of momentum, discipline around costs, momentum in the businesses, looks to us very encouraging, and therefore we’re confident that we’re on track to achieve our targets.”
Across the board, the bank noted an impact from the relative strength of the euro against the U.S. dollar, with von Moltke describing it as the “big thing that’s kind of flowing through our numbers.”
Deutsche Bank shares were up 5.76% at 09:15 a.m. London time (04:15 a.m. E.T.), nearing 10-year highs.
Other second-quarter highlights included:

Profit before tax of 2.4 billion euros, up 34% year-on-year, excluding the impact of the Postbank litigation.
CET 1 capital ratio, a measure of bank solvency, was 14.2%, compared with 13.8% in the March quarter.
Post-tax return on tangible equity (ROTE) rate of 10.1%, from 11.9% in the previous quarter.

The firm’s core investment banking unit reported a 3% year-on-year uptick in revenue to 2.7 billion euros in the June quarter, but reported mixed results at its subdivisions.
In fixed income and currencies, the bank posted a “strong” 11% revenue bump driven by higher net interest income in financing and increased volatility and client activity in foreign exchange. But Deutsche Bank’s origination and advisory division — which deals with relationships with major corporates and sovereign institutions — logged a second-quarter revenue decline of 29% to 416 million euros, citing “market uncertainty” and noting an overall “postponement of some material transactions into the second half of 2025.”
Corporate banking revenues, meanwhile, dipped by 1% on the year to 1.896 billion euros in the second quarter, with von Moltke noting “a bit of a chill” in corporate activity and decision-making.
“Loan growth has been more sluggish than we’d like to have seen,” he said, flagging the effect of foreign exchange translations from the parts of the business accounted in the U.S. dollar. “Otherwise, as I say, it’s been a normalization of deposit margins, a little bit of effects. That’s … held the business back in the quarter.”

Stock chart icon

Euro/dollar

European banks overall are facing the challenge of navigating a lower interest rate environment, with the European Central Bank most recently bringing its key interest rate down to 2% in June and expected to hold that monetary policy during its meeting later in the Thursday session. 
A recent German and broader European defense spending push has been supporting gains within the industry and offering new investment opportunities for European lenders. Speaking to CNBC’s Annette Weisbach in late June, Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing said that “we have clearly, in particular on the European side, been underinvesting” and stressed the lender has sized up both its portfolio appetite and resourcing to advise clients on defense ventures.  
Domestically, the tumult that gripped German politics at the end of last year has quietened after snap elections awarded stewardship to a new ruling coalition under Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The renewed stability has been reflected in investor and client sentiment and is also beginning to reverberate in business volumes, according to von Moltke.
“That’s a real change from the past several years that where that hasn’t been the case,” he said.
But the European Union’s largest economy — and the third largest exporter globally — is now mired in trade uncertainty as the 27-nation bloc races to agree a tariff deal with U.S. President Donald Trump by an Aug. 1 deadline.
“If tariffs materialise in August, a recession in Germany in 2025 cannot be ruled out,” Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel said last week, according to Reuters.
Von Moltke likewise recognized that U.S. tariffs could pose a “relatively steep” increase in currency translations and an ultimate “headwind” for European exporters, but said the impact will be “very varied” for each corporate business. More

European investing app Lightyear is set to announce that it’s raised $23 million in a funding round led by NordicNinja.
A host of Estonia’s top tech entrepreneurs — including ride-hailing unicorn Bolt’s CEO Markus Villig — also invested in the company.
Lightyear also debuted several AI features, including one that lets users see what caused a jump or fall in a stock’s price on any given day.

The Lightyear app.

Some of the biggest names of Estonia’s tech scene are backing Lightyear, a startup looking to become Europe’s answer to commission-free trading pioneer Robinhood.
Based in London, Lightyear develops an app that lets users invest in a range of over 5,000 stocks, exchange-traded funds and money market funds. It was founded by two former Wise employees, Martin Sokk and Mihkel Aamer, in 2021.

The company is set to announce later on Thursday that it has raised $23 million in a new round of funding led by NordicNinja, a Japanese-backed venture capital fund based in Europe. Estonian tech entrepreneur Markus Villig, who co-founded ride-hailing unicorn Bolt has also invested.
Lightyear CEO Sokk told CNBC that the firm didn’t necessarily need to raise more cash for the business but chose to do so because of the caliber of investors involved.
“People like Markus have been building massive companies in many, many markets, and this is something that’s really exciting for us because it’s so hard to go into all the markets and understand their local dynamics and what people need,” he said.
Lightyear currently operates in 25 countries. However, with help from angel investors like Bolt’s Villig, the firm will be able to launch in another five markets “pretty quickly,” Sokk said.
Villig told CNBC that it can be “challenging to scale a business across multiple countries in a heavily regulated sector,” adding that Europe’s less developed retail investing market provides ample opportunities for disruption.

Other Estonian angel investors who have previously backed Lightyear also participated in the funding round, including Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, Checkout.com’s former Chief Technology Officer Ott Kaukver and Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn.
Estonia is widely considered a prominent tech hub in Europe. The country is home to the highest number of unicorns per capita in Europe, according to the Estonian Investment Agency. Meanwhile, Estonia’s e-residency scheme has also enabled foreigners to become digital residents and launch their companies in the country.
The new round values five-year-old Lightyear at between $200 million and $300 million, significantly higher than its valuation in 2022 when it raised $25 million, according to two people familiar with the matter who preferred to remain anonymous as the information has not been made public.

Pushing into AI, crypto

Alongside the additional funding, Lightyear is also launching new artificial intelligence features. AI has been a hot area of investment for startups following the explosive popularity of generative AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
One of the features, called “Why Did It Move,” allows users to select a point in time on a stock chart and see what happened that day to cause a jump or fall in a company’s share price. The firm is also using AI to provide “bull” and “bear” theses on stocks as well as short updates on assets in their own portfolios.
“In the end, you’re going to have two models” when it comes to investing, according to Sokk: “Self-driving money,” where you ask an AI to achieve certain investment goals, and a “manual gearbox” approach of figuring out different strategies and approaches on your own.
Still, the market for online investment products is heavily competitive. Lightyear faces some hefty competition from both incumbent brokerage services as well as more modern tech players such as Robinhood, Revolut and Trade Republic.
However, Sokk insists Lightyear is building a differentiated enough product to stand out from the crowd. While competitors like Robinhood profit from offering risky products like crypto and margin trading, Lightyear is focused on serving long-term investors, he told CNBC.
To that end, Sokk said Lightyear is planning on rolling out a crypto product of its own in two months’ time — one that’s “more focused on a long-term view.” More

Among the strait-laced denizens of Wall Street, crypto’s “use cases” are often discussed with a smirk. Veterans have seen it all before. Digital assets have come and gone, often in style, sending hype-prone investors in memecoins and NFTs on a ride. Their use as anything other than a tool for speculation and financial crime has been repeatedly found wanting. More

Stock exchanges are the quaintest corners of modern finance. At other financial institutions, the typical trading floor features people in t-shirts sat at ergonomic keyboards, sipping herbal tea and reviewing computer code. Enter New York’s bourse, meanwhile, and you might as well have been through a time warp. Tense-looking people bustle everywhere sporting headsets and relics known as neckties. Everyone looks as if they shout a lot. As in a cattle market, opening and closing bells are rung to mark either end of the day’s trading session, at 9.30am and 4pm. More