With Slawomir Krupa, the major French bank is to get a new CEO.
(Photo: Reuters)
Paris The major French bank Société Générale has decided on a successor for the outgoing CEO Frédéric Oudéa: According to the company, the supervisory board unanimously nominated Slawomir Krupa on Friday, who currently heads the investment business of the financial institution. After the 14-year era of Oudéa, the third largest listed bank in France is facing a generational change, but at the same time is focusing on continuity with its own Krupa.
Société Générale announced that the supervisory board will propose 48-year-old Krupa as the new CEO to the shareholders at the annual general meeting on May 23, 2023. Supervisory Board Chairman Lorenzo Bini Smaghi said he was “very satisfied” with the election. Oudéa will support his successor during the transition phase.
After graduating from Sciences Po University in Paris, Krupa began his career in 1996 in the audit department of Société Générale and quickly rose through the ranks. From 2012 he was deputy head of the finance department, from 2016 he was responsible for the bank’s America business. He has been at the helm of investment banking since early 2021.
Oudéa had declared in May that he would not accept another mandate. A few weeks ago it was announced that the 59-year-old would become the new chairman of the supervisory board of the pharmaceutical company Sanofi.
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According to media reports, the race to succeed him at Société Générale ended in a duel between Krupa and Sébastien Proto, the head of private banking, who came from the investment bank Rothschild in 2018. According to information from the newspaper “Les Échos”, the supervisory board favored Krupa because of its longer experience in the company and because of its greater awareness among financial market players.
Krupa faced with new market environment
Krupa takes up his post under completely different circumstances than his predecessor, whose tenure was marked by a historic phase of low interest rates. Krupa’s rise to the helm of Société Générale coincides with the end of central banks’ loose monetary policies and the return of inflation, which will define the financial sector’s business environment for years to come.
From Oudéa he inherits the goal of achieving annual growth in yields of at least three percent by 2025. Société Générale wants to complete a number of major projects in the nine months before the change to the top post, such as taking over the branch network of Crédit du Nord on the French market.
In addition, the 4.9 billion euro purchase of the Dutch car leasing provider Leaseplan by the Société Générale subsidiary ALD Automotive is to be sealed. According to Société Générale, Krupa will also focus on the expansion of its subsidiary Boursorama, the leading direct bank in France.
The manager becomes chief controller at Sanofi.
(Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
Oudéa once took over the management of Société Générale after the affair surrounding the trader Jérôme Kerviel. The bank was shaken in 2008 by allegations against Kerviel that it had caused a loss of almost five billion euros through speculative transactions on its own.
No CEO of a major European bank has been in office longer than Oudéa. His tenure was like a roller coaster ride: he led Société Générale through the aftermath of the subprime crisis and the euro debt crisis. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the money house slipped deep into the red and returned last year with a profit in the billions.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Western sanctions then hit Société Générale like hardly any other European financial institution. The French gave up their Russian business with the Rosbank branch – resulting in a loss of 1.48 billion euros in the second quarter of 2022. Thanks to good results in private customer business and in investment banking, the bank still performed significantly better than analysts had expected.
More: Quarterly loss of Société Générale lower than feared due to exit from Russia.