(Thankfully, none of Deutsche’s 600 employees was hurt or killed in the attack.)
But even the challenge of shopping for New York real estate pales beside the rest of Hughes’s agenda. Deutsche has finally stopped hemming and hawing and bought Zurich Scudder for $2.5 billion. (The cash-and-swap deal gives Zurich Financial Services access to Deutsche customers for its insurance products, as well as control of the bank’s insurance arm.) Now the new CEO must stanch the outflow of funds from patchily performing Scudder, carry through CIO Dean Barr’s good start in reinvigorating Deutsche’s institutional asset management business, integrate the $278 billion-in-assets Scudder into Deutsche’s now nearly $1 trillion global asset management operation and, in the process, justify the faith of Deutsche Bank CEO Rolf Breuer.
“This is a transformational event, and I can feel a new energy pulsing around the organization,” says the 43-year-old Hughes, who until seven months ago was global head of Merrill Lynch’s securities financing business and has no formal money management experience. “We can create something that neither firm would have been able to build on its own. People at both organizations have been through integrations in the past, and we know what works and what doesn’t.” His boss and Deutsche’s clients are counting on it.
