In late 2018, as Deutsche Bank AG executives mulled the future of their troubled lender, Chairman Paul Achleitner encouraged them to emulate a payments firm that had become a wunderkind of German finance: Wirecard AG.
The two companies were already close. Deutsche Bank was a key lender to Wirecard and its chief executive officer, Markus Braun, who also sat on one of its regional advisory boards. Andreas Loetscher, an Ernst & Young partner who had overseen several audits of Wirecard’s results, had recently joined Deutsche Bank as chief accounting officer. DWS, the bank’s asset-management unit, was a shareholder.
