It came as a complete shock at Société Générale when, on Friday, September 30, the bank’s board of directors endorsed Slawomir Krupa, 48, deputy chief executive officer in charge of corporate banking, to succeed Frédéric Oudéa, the outgoing chief executive. Mr. Krupa will take office on May 24, 2023, after the next general meeting where he will be nominated as director.
The decision came as a major surprise since the position seemed to be promised to Sébastien Proto, 44, the other internal candidate, and above all, a finance inspector just like Jacques Mayoux, Marc Viénot, Daniel Bouton and Frédéric Oudéa, to mention only the most recent directors of the company. The appointment of Mr. Krupa, a graduate of Sciences Po Paris, marks a major break in this lineage. Added to this shift is the fact that the future boss, whose family lives in New York, has a Polish passport as well as French citizenship.
“It’s a slap in the face for the General Inspectorate of Finance, and Emmanuel Macron’s graduating class at ENA (National School of Administration), who thought everything was promised to them,” said a veteran of power circles. “We had a difficult choice to make between two excellent profiles, which demonstrates the wealth of talent at Société Générale,” said the bank’s chairman Lorenzo Bini Smaghi who led the selection process with Gérard Mestrallet, chairman of the appointments committee. He added that “Mr. Krupa has a capacity for vision and leadership and a great understanding of financial markets.”
When Mr. Proto, managing partner of Rothschild & Co and former ministerial cabinet, joined Société Générale in 2018 as head of strategy, he naturally appeared as Mr. Oudéa’s successor. In 2020, he had been promoted to deputy CEO, in charge of retail and private banking. Since then, he has been in charge of one of the company’s major projects, namely the merger between the branch networks of Crédit du Nord and those of Société Générale. “We collaborate closely with Sébastien Proto in order to avoid social breakdown. He’s very attentive,” said Frédéric Guyonnet, national president of the SNB CFE-CGC union, for whom the choice of Mr. Krupa came as a “huge surprise.”
‘Twenty-five years of experience’
Unanimously and by secret ballot, the board of directors followed the recommendation of the appointments committee, which voted in favor of Mr. Krupa, who comes from the bank’s audit department, an elite body responsible for scrutinizing all activities around the world and considered to be the high road within the establishment. Since January 2021, he has been responsible for putting the corporate and investment banking activities back in order, a department that was for a long time the group’s flagship but which has been going from bad to worse since the discovery of the fraud initiated by Jérôme Kerviel in January 2008.
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