Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank in merger talks
So it looks like Germany’s Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank are in early stage talks about merging.
Politicians are among those who are encouraging the move that would create Europe’s second biggest bank behind HSBC but neither bank seems to be particularly keen on the combination.
Deutsche continues to suffer from fallout over money laundering, leadership and exposure to Trump’s business empire and is still very much exposed to investment banking.
Commerzbank, on the other hand, has slimmed down its volatile investment banking firepower to concentrate on becoming a more boring but stable retail and corporate lender.
I don’t think that it will work if they get together as neither of them really want to do it, but we’ll see soon enough whether they bow to the pressure.
I don’t think that size for size’s sake is enough to make something as potentially complicated as this would be to work.
TikTok owner ByteDance’s potential flotation
The other thing I wanted to talk about today was China’s internet tech company ByteDance, which has a massive international hit on its hands with short video app TikTok.
The company was last valued at $75bn in November but its success with the international version of its original Douyin game that debuted in 2016 is likely to have helped its PR no end.
It currently has over 200 million international users, including 3.7 million from the UK.
There have been concerns voiced over how it treats childrens’ data and how safe a space it is, but if it can overcome these issues, its potential will be huge given that it has exposure to the teenage audience that advertisers value highly.
