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Deutsche Bank has said that it wants to expand its private credit offering even as investors grow increasingly wary about credit quality in the sector.
The German bank on Thursday disclosed that its private credit portfolio increased to €25.9bn at the end of 2025, a jump of about 6 per cent on the previous year.
Despite growing investor unease, Deutsche’s asset management arm said it was committed to “expanding private credit offerings through partnerships with [its] corporate bank and investment bank”.
Last year, Deutsche announced a deal with its majority-owned asset manager DWS to co-operate on private credit, and in September launched an evergreen private markets fund with DWS and Swiss private capital firm Partners Group.
The bank said it applied “conservative underwriting standards” to its private credit exposures, but added that it could face “potential indirect credit risks” from its exposure “through interconnected portfolios and counterparties”.
Deutsche’s share price fell more than 4 per cent in early afternoon trading in Frankfurt, underperforming the Euro Stoxx Banks index, which tracks the biggest lenders in the Eurozone.
The bank’s shares have declined by more than a fifth since the start of the year.
The multitrillion-dollar private capital industry is contending with a surge in redemption requests amid growing scrutiny about underwriting standards as well as the sector’s exposure to software companies that could be disrupted by artificial intelligence.
The exodus from private credit funds was in part sparked by the failures of two auto parts suppliers last year, which raised questions about due diligence in corporate lending markets.
“Failures of a select number of subprime lenders in the US increased investor focus on risks associated with private credit and raised wider concerns around underwriting standards and fraud risk,” Deutsche said.
Deutsche’s loan exposure to the technology sector also jumped by more than a third last year to €15.8bn.
The bank had been exploring ways to hedge its exposure to data centres after extending billions of dollars in debt to the sector to keep up with demand for artificial intelligence and cloud computing, the FT reported in November.
Deutsche’s investment banking business has “bet big” on data centre financing, according to a senior executive. However, the scale of expenditure on AI infrastructure has prompted concerns that a bubble is forming.
Separately, the German lender disclosed that it was being sued for more than £600mn by four former employees seeking damages in connection with a probe by the lender that contributed to their convictions in 2019 by an Italian court.
The claim underscores how Deutsche remains entangled in some longstanding legal issues despite management spending years trying to repair the bank’s reputation and paying costly settlements and penalties.
Deutsche said it “considers all such claims to be without merit and will defend itself against them robustly, including disputing the inflated, unrealistic alleged losses claimed”.
The bank did not disclose if it made any provisions for the cases.
