by Kate
22. November 2010 09:01
The Deutsche Bank has decided to not only spend it time on things like borrowing, lending and handing out mortgages (or encouraging bad credit records) by launching a casino hotel on the Las Vegas strip called the Cosmopolitan Las Vegas.
The project comprises of a massive two tower, 3,000 room casino hotel with restaurants, nightclubs and slot machines. The opening night will have performances by Jay-Z and Coldplay and before-hand there will be a national campaign of TV adverts that go quite risqué with a bottomless hotel bellboy and a tagline that goes: “Just the right amount of wrong.”
It seems quite out of character for a bank to move away from its reputation as a stable, well-established and conservative leading bank and set its sights on the glamorous and high rolling world of Sin City.
Well, it’s all quite logical when you know the full story. Like so many banks a few years ago, the Deutsche Bank was very ‘flexible’ in its loaning policies, and gave the original developer of the property a generous loan. This was about 1 billion dollars back. The developer subsequently defaulted on the loan and instead of auctioning off the ‘half-baked’ property at a loss, the Deutsche Bank decided to put more money into it and get into a whole new kind of business.
The bank made sure that only the best resources were used for the new creation and got its own engineers, architects and interior designers who all contributed to creating a casino hotel that veered away from the sterile, stuffy bank feel and instead created a space with an atmosphere of ‘relaxed luxury’.