John Cryan, Deutsche Bank AG 's next chief executive officer, is expected to continue sharply cutting costs while also moving Germany's biggest lender past long-standing conduct issues and regulatory challenges that have dogged it in recent years, according to several people familiar with his appointment.
The 54-year-old, a former finance chief of UBS AG and a former senior executive at Singaporean state investment fund Temasek Holdings Pte. Ltd., moves into his new role July 1, Deutsche Bank said Sunday. He will succeed Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen, the current, embattled co-CEOs. Mr. Jain leaves at the end of June while Mr. Fitschen will initially stay on as co-CEO with Mr. Cryan, leaving the bank in May 2016.
Messrs. Jain and Fitschen had contracts extending to March 2017. Mr. Cryan couldn't be reached.
Mr. Cryan knows the German bank well. As a member of its supervisory board since 2013, the veteran British investment banker is familiar with a raft of issues tied to the bank's strategic direction and ongoing investigations into alleged misconduct. Mr. Cryan has chaired Deutsche Bank's audit committee and also served on the risk committee, both key roles.
Deutsche Bank's supervisory-board chairman, Paul Achleitner, emphasized Mr. Cryan's banking and financial background in a statement on Sunday. Mr. Achleitner said the new CEO "espouses the professional and personal values required to advance" the bank's strategic plans.
Unlike Mr. Jain, whose inability to come to grips with the language was seen as a problem by some within the bank, according to people familiar with the matter, Mr. Cryan is a functional speaker of German
Current and former Deutsche Bank executives said the appointment of Mr. Cryan would boost morale, which has flagged in recent years. The mood within the bank has worsened this year as the firm faced a barrage of criticism from regulators and investors that culminated at the bank's annual meeting last month, when only 61% of shareholders voted in favor of management's performance.
. Cryan's appointment was seen by several executives as likely to bring clarification of how the bank might proceed with its cost-cutting efforts. The lender has already taken steps to scale back its investment-banking and retail operations as part of a broader, long-awaited strategic overhaul that was announced in April.
Richard Stein, a partner at Options Group, a New York and London-based consulting firm specializing in hiring and compensation in financial services, told The Wall Street Journal that he expects Mr. Cryan to "bring the knife" to Deutsche Bank in an effort to cut the lender's high cost base, including compensation at the investment bank.
Mr. Cryan was at S.G. Warburg when the investment bank was acquired in 1995, before becoming part of UBS. He eventually became head of the Swiss bank's investment-banking group for financial institutions.
He became UBS's finance chief in 2008, and was widely credited in industry and government circles for his role in bringing about the Swiss government's October 2008 bank-rescue package. He left UBS in 2011, and served as European president of Temasek from 2012 to 2014.
In January, the London-based hedge-fund firm Man Group PLC named Mr. Cryan a nonexecutive director, citing his regulatory experience.
Ingo Speich, a fund manager at Union Asset Management Holding AG, one of Deutsche Bank's top 20 shareholders, said Sunday that Mr. Cryan's appointment makes sense because he knows the bank well but isn't connected to litigation problems that continue to cause trouble for the lender.
"The supervisory board is now drawing the consequences from the weak approval of the management board," at the bank's annual general meeting last month, Mr. Speich said. Investors said at the meeting that they had lost trust in the executive team's ability to meet financial targets and handle lawsuits the bank faces.
Write to Jenny Strasburg at jenny.strasburg@wsj.com and Eyk Henning at eyk.henning@wsj.com
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