- Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani, one of Deutsche Bank's (DB -1.5%) largest shareholders and Qatar's former prime minister, urges European financial services firms to consolidate through mergers if they want to compete with Chinese and American banks.
- "Everybody's waiting to have a better valuation to think about merging, but I believe to merge now is better because the market is being taken by the big banks," he said at the Qatar Economic Forum, according to Bloomberg reporting.
- He declined to specifically comment on what Deutsche Bank should do, only saying, "mergers are inevitable."
- Sheik Hamad, also a prominent property investor, currently favors hotels over office or retail space as vaccinated people return to their pre-pandemic behavior, he said.
- Deutsche Bank and German competitor Commerzbank had been in talks to merge in 2019; at the time, Qatari shareholders were resisting such a deal because it would reduce their stakes in Germany's largest lender, Bloomberg reported.