The 2 heads of Deutsche Bank's US leveraged finance business just quit to join rivals, and they've been quickly replaced

REUTERS/Luke MacGregor

Workers sweep leaves outside Deutsche Bank offices in London December 5, 2013.

• Deutsche Bank has lost its two heads of leveraged finance in the US to rival banks.
• Scott Sartorius has left the firm to take on a role at Citi, while Chris Blum is joining a rival bank, according to people familiar with the matter.
• The pair are just the latest in a handful of senior departures from the German lender.

Deutsche Bank has lost its two coheads of US leveraged finance, as staff turnover mounts at the German lender.

Scott Sartorius and Christopher Blum and are leaving the bank, according to people familiar with the matter. Sartorius will become a managing director at Citi, where he worked earlier in his career, while Blum is expected to join a rival, the people said. Sartorius is currently taking paid time off, known on Wall Street as garden leave.

The bank moved quickly to name their replacements, tapping Ian Dorrington and Manfred Affenzeller to run the US business, according to an internal memo sent Tuesday.

"Chris and Scott have played a central part in building our leading LDCM franchise and we wish them all the best," Sean Murphy, cohead of global leveraged debt capital markets, wrote in the memo.

The executives are just the latest senior departures at Deutsche Bank, which is seeking to convince current employees that it's committed to businesses in markets and investment-banking in the US. Rival bankers tell Business Insider they are seeing a flood of resumes from Deutsche Bank executives looking for other jobs.

Leveraged finance has typically been a bright spot for the firm, with Deutsche Bank jumping one spot to seventh this year in the US leveraged finance rankings, with $33.5 billion in deals, according to Dealogic data. That's one spot higher than Citi.

In November 2017, Mark Fedorcik, cohead of Deutsche's investment bank, told Bloomberg the bank wanted to become a top arranger of leveraged loans again.

Deutsche Bank has been shuffling top executives in the past several weeks after the appointment of Christian Sewing as CEO. Sewing, who replaced John Cryan as CEO in April, has said the bank will scale back its ambitions after three years of losses, and he has already announced a plan to cut more than 7,000 employees.