The story
Deutsche Bank was founded in 1870 as a specialist bank for foreign trade. In October 2001, Deutsche Bank listed its stock on the New York Stock Exchange, the first NYSE listing after the September 11 attacks. From 2002-2005, Deutsche Bank expanded rapidly through acquisitions of Rued Blass & Cie private bank, German Norisbank, Berliner Bank, and Deutsche Postbank, and Russian investment bank United Financial Group, achieving a target return on equity of 25%, and becoming one of the world's nine largest bulge bracket investment banks, and the world's largest foreign exchange provider.
By mid 2005, Deutsche Bank was in search of new and innovative ways to continue growing its global presence, and its market share of global foreign exchange trading, while meeting the increasing client demand for streamlined access to capital market products.
Launch
The idea for dbFX came from the executive management of one of Deutsche Bank's largest clients, FXCM, then the market leader in online margin FX trading, with a growing institutional footprint. A team led by Senior Managing Director Jayme Illien successfully proposed and structured a global strategic partnership with Deutsche Bank to establish and launch dbFX.
dbFX was initially launched with 10-20 countries with Illien as the founding global head of dbFX. He hand-picked, trained, and led a global cross-functional team across sales, trading, risk management, research, compliance, operations, and technology to launch and expand dbFX into 180+ countries, legal and regulatory jurisdictions, and nine languages.
dbFX offered the ability to trade on “one click” real time streaming executable quotes 24 hours a day at spreads as low as 1.5 pips on 34 currency pairs directly from the interbank market, the 1000 largest and most active foreign exchange banks in the world.
Deutsche Bank was the counterparty to all trades. All client funds were held at Deutsche Bank AG and protected by the Deposit Protection Fund of the Association of German Banks.
From 2006-2008, dbFX became the fastest growing business within Deutsche Bank, and a major contributor to Deutsche Bank's reign as the world's largest provider of foreign exchange trading from 2005-2013.
Many of the original dbFX team are now executive leaders at some of the world's leading financial institutions.
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Closure
After the 2008 financial crisis, and the subsequent changing regulations of global financial markets, including the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and the Basel III capital and liquidity standards, Deutsche Bank discontinued dbFX, and a portion of dbFX business was acquired by GAIN Capital, a global provider of online trading.
Deutsche Bank released a statement about dbFX:
“dbFX volumes grew every year since 2006, culminating with 2010 volumes 56% higher than 2009. dbFX has been a strongly performing business for Deutsche Bank but has reached a point where in order to reach its full potential it requires significant investment in specific resources which are not consistent with Deutsche Bank’s current strategic initiatives.”
Speculation about why Deutsche Bank sold dbFX to Gain Capital has ranged, and included new global markets and financial regulations, lower corporate risk tolerance considering the bank's losses and exposure to the housing credit bubble and subprime and CDO market, Deutsche Bank management changes in response to the 2008 financial crisis, and issues regarding competitive threats to profitability with incumbent Deutsche Bank businesses.
From Wikipedia’s article on DBFX, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4