UniCredit CEO Andrea Orcel is pressing Commerzbank to adopt from January a restructuring model built on deep cost cuts, fewer management layers and stronger revenue generation after securing 48% of the German lender’s shares. His plan would reduce Commerzbank’s cost base by €1.3 billion, or about a fifth, while keeping it separate from UniCredit’s German unit until 2029 to 2030. The proposal draws on UniCredit’s own turnaround since Orcel became CEO in 2021. The Italian bank cut its workforce by a fifth, shifted hundreds of staff from central teams into branches, and reduced management tiers from nine to four in a process it calls delayering (removing layers of management). Helped by higher interest rates and tight expense control, UniCredit delivered record profits and a 10-fold rise in its shares since Orcel’s arrival, about three times the gain for the wider European banking sector. That record may still be hard to reproduce in Germany. The hostile bid has already strained relations with Commerzbank staff and management, while German regulators and European Central Bank supervisors have said integration would be challenging and long-lasting. Executives also say UniCredit’s strict emphasis on business-generating roles over support functions has created internal strain, an issue supervisors watch closely because compliance and risk teams must remain adequately staffed during cost-cutting.