Frédéric Oudéa has a successor at the head of Societe Generale. The group’s board of directors has chosen Slawomir Krupa, currently deputy managing director in charge of financing and investment activities, to replace him in May 2023. The bank has been looking for a new leader since the outgoing surprise announcement, during of the last general meeting of the group, on May 17, that he would not stand once more at the end of his mandate.
First proposed as a director to the shareholders at the next general meeting on May 23, 2023, he « sera [ensuite] appointed Chief Executive Officer by the Board of Directors” once elected, writes Societe Generale in a press release.
M. Krupa “has a very good knowledge of the bank”told Agence France-Presse Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, chairman of the group’s board of directors. “He has the experience” and has a good view of “development of the banking system at the international level”he continued, praising his “leadership, his ability to train teams”.
Two names circulated internally: Slawomir Krupa and Sébastien Proto, head of the retail banking networks who orchestrated the thorny merger between Société Générale and Crédit du Nord. “It was a difficult choice, both were very good”admits M. Bini Smaghi.
Career within the group
Aged 48, Mr. Krupa, head of corporate banking and investor solutions, known internally and by investors by the acronym SGCIB (for “Societe Generale Corporate & Investment Banking”), corresponds to the robot portrait drawn by the outgoing Frédéric Oudéa before the unions in May: already a member of the management team and aged around 45, 50 so as to be able to register for the long term.
A graduate of the Paris Institute of Political Studies in 1996, Slawomir Krupa is a pure house product. He was able to demonstrate, like Frédéric Oudéa in his time, a long-term career within the bank. This Franco-Polish entered through the inspection of Societe Generale, an internal audit service considered as a path to excellence in the bank. The only parenthesis in his career: he left the group between 1999 and 2002 to found and manage a start-up specializing in the field of online finance in Eastern Europe.
In 2005, he joined the management committee of this department. He then held, from 2007, several positions within SGCIB: head of strategy and development, Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa regions, assistant to financing activities… before taking the management of the Americas zone in 2016 then that of SGCIB in 2021.
Now begins a six-month period of « transition progressive » since Mr. Oudéa will not leave his functions until May 2023, on the eve of his 60th birthday, following fifteen years spent at the head of the group. Slawomir Krupa will take office rid of the Russian subsidiary Rosbank, sold before last summer to the investment fund Interros, and in a more buoyant economic environment for credit institutions, due to the rise in interest rates.
