Masterclass presented by Bourse Direct, the partner of all your investments. Every day, we accompany you to make the right decisions and bring your projects to life.
Hello, how are you? Are we good here or not? Okay, a quick question. Have you ever met a CAC 40 CEO or a female CAC 40 CEO? Not yet. No, no, no. Well, this is going to be a great experience, especially since he is unclassifiable, quite extraordinary, quite brilliant. You'll see, his background is not typical. He was a lawyer, an investment banker, a historian in his spare time, and you'll see, he's not someone born with a silver spoon in his mouth; he made it on his own. So here it is, well, where is he? Ah, there he is. Hello, Stéphane Bard.
Yeah, that you're here. Come, I'll introduce you. Well, here is Stéphane Bouga, the CEO of Euronex. Let's applaud him.
Stéphane Bouga. How do you simply explain what Euronex does, the businesses of Euronex, for those who know nothing about the stock market?
The stock market is something that was invented 5 centuries ago to solve the problem of people who have too much money and no ideas, and the problem of people who have many ideas and not enough money. So that's what we do: we connect people who want to finance projects because they have projects but no resources, with people who have too many resources and not enough projects to create returns.
Okay, let's go for a new masterclass on Public Sénat, the masterclass of Stéphane Bouga, the CEO of Euronex. Let's settle in. Go ahead, sit down there.
So, in real life, obviously, they never meet and that's normal: on one side, the students, fully focused on their training, and on the other side, the greatest French economic leaders. Well, on Public Sénat, what we want is that each month, we want to bring them together to freely exchange on the topics that our youth consider a priority. I tell you, Stéphane Boug, for him it will be a surprise. I remind you and I specify that for the one who asks the most relevant question, they will be offered at the end of the show 100,000 Euronex shares. Let's thank and applaud Stéphane Bouznaard, especially since the share is over 100 euros. Do the math quickly. Actually, even more than 130 than 100. There you go. Obviously, it was a joke.
Stéphane, we have a photo of you. When you were 20 years old, you were a student. It's 1984 at the time of the creation of SOS Racism, of which you are in the middle, I specify, I had to specify.
I was really irresistible, surrounded by Bernard-Henri Lévy on one side and Marek Halter on the other.
You are a co-founder of SOS Racism, it's 1984. How is this a founding moment of your career or the beginning of your career?
Well, it was 40 years ago. We just entered the 40s. All of this is prodigiously distant. No, it's very moving because you wonder in your life there is a young person who wonders what happened to him. And so I was the same person and I think the most important things I learned to do the job I do now, I probably learned there. Namely, well, it's the domain in which it expresses itself, that's commitment. Commitment is a kind of force within you that makes you convinced that your own happiness depends a little on the happiness of others. That is, for good things to happen to you, good things must happen to others to have impact. And so this idea that we can transform things, that we don't resign ourselves to the status quo, that everyone can make a difference, that we must listen to different people to achieve, and that we must align different people to converge towards an action that has impact. It's something that dates from that time. It's a bit conceptual what I said, more concretely it was quite simple, and sorry I hope we won't just talk like a war veteran because the difference between young and old is that the old have more memories than future and the young have more projects than memories. So I prefer to be in the second category.
But since you mobilize me with this black and white thing, there was a huge problem in France: we were in 1984-85, the far right of the time was led by Jean-Marie Le Pen with an extremely marked xenophobic agenda and an ambiguity about nostalgia, it's very ambiguous because some were anti-Gaullist but there was a nostalgia for Vichy in part, there was a form of nostalgia, then the most certain of the OAS against the Gaullists who were in favor of Algeria's independence. At the time, I was secretary general of the Union of Jewish Students of France. We were with leftist Trotskyists like Julien Dray, Harlem Désir. We said to ourselves, it's not possible in this country, the anti-racist opinion is largely majority. Across all political tendencies. Anti-racism is not a left-wing thing, it's not a community thing. So we said, let's do something very unifying that can be expressed by selling badges. So we invented 'Don't touch my buddy', we sold 2 million badges by organizing big concerts. There were no social networks, we did a big concert with 400,000 people at the Place de la Concorde and other concerts in the provinces, and the idea was to send a very strong message to all political forces saying: 'You can argue about everything, but anti-racism is majority in this country. So calm down on that.' And we succeeded in creating this dike.
Stéphane Bougard, with a Tunisian father who arrived in France at the end of the 1960s who was a worker in a brewery doing three eight-hour shifts and a mother who was a teacher in a village school, nothing predestined you to become a CAC 40 CEO.
I had a father who had many punchlines, he left school at 13, he said 'There are two things to do: say hello, hello Mr. Mayor because we owe everything to the Republic, and work harder than others, than the spoiled brats who grew up between a library and a piano and who will always be lazier because it will always be easier for them.' So I grew up with the obsession from childhood to work, work, work, work more than others and respect the institutions and the Republic more than anyone else. Work to earn your freedom. Work to have a decent job, first to be respected. Because when you are poor and Tunisian and you speak with an accent and you have skin, my father has brown skin like this sofa, and you speak with a very strong accent, what you want is that your children have a job where you are respected for what you do more than what he experienced. But the most important thing that made the difference was when my mother became a middle school teacher in a crappy suburb of Nancy in Champignol and my father was a worker. And there in this crappy school where I think I am the only one in my 6th grade class to have passed the baccalaureate, in 5th grade, the French teacher told my mother, 'the little one must do Latin.' And I was raised like horses by teachers who made me do 7 hours of Latin, 7 hours of Greek per week from 4th grade to senior year and that's it. And I loved it. I was very good. I worked harder than the sons of dentists or pharmacists.
Trajectories like yours, Stéphane, are still possible today because we say that the social elevator is broken, and stories like yours still make you dream.
No, I don't know. No, but I don't know. I say there are things that don't change and things that are complicated. The things that don't change is that in the end, what determines your success is your ability to work harder than others. I am absolutely convinced of that. Society is not responsible for your failures, and you are not individually responsible for your success. There is something you don't realize the importance of: access to information. Now, with your phone, you have exactly the same information as those who grew up between a library and a piano. There is no more difference. There are other differences of a different nature, notably self-confidence. People in privileged backgrounds are taught to swim, to ride a bike without training wheels, to do sports, etc. And above all, they are taught to be ambitious. That is a skill that goes with the rest. When you live in a non-privileged environment, you are taught to ride a bike without training wheels, you are taught to swim at the municipal pool, and then you are told, 'Yes, maybe, but that's for others, the big jobs, etc.' So there is always a difference in ambition.
Okay, now it's time for our student friends to ask you questions. Stéphane Bougena, they all have different backgrounds but they have in common being engaged since they did civic service or volunteering, and of course we thank the Institute of Engagement who put us in touch. We start with Mohamed.
Hello Mr. Bouga. I am Mohamed Lamine, student at Lesil in first year of actuarial science. My question is: you are CEO and Chairman of the Managing Board of Euronex for 10 years, and we saw that the revenue of Euronex increased from 458 million euros in 2015 to more than 1.4 billion euros as of December 31. Actually, it's more, it's 1.6 billion today, isn't it?
We are, yes, let me correct, but as of December 31, 2023.
As of December 31, 2023, can you tell us what was the key decision for this financial success?
Can I say something even more important than the key decision? First, the numbers are even better than what you say, but it's normal that you don't know all of them. I'm impressed that you were able to verify all that. The Dutch have an extraordinary saying: the best recipe for failure is to please everyone. And so the recipe for success is to have the inner strength to have unpleasant conversations with suppliers, with employees who want the moon, with customers who don't understand that we need to raise prices to make a living, with all sorts of partners who want to do a joint venture like the bacon and eggs joint venture. You know, the one where the chicken goes to the pig and says, 'Let's do something great. It's called eggs and bacon. I, the chicken, bring the eggs. You, the pig, why don't you bring the bacon?' So all these difficult conversations are what make the difference between success and failure. And many things we did were not so complicated to conceive intellectually. They were complicated to execute emotionally. That's the heart of the matter. You know, I often quote in town halls, in conversations with employees, this phrase from Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War: 'To rest or to remain free, you must choose.' And really, my conviction is that those who win are those who work harder and face difficulties now. Those who fail are those who prioritize the immediate at the expense of tomorrow.
