Stéphane Boujnah (Euronext) - La transformation de l'un des plus grands succès européens

The only thing that allowed us to move from this survival phase to the growth phase is that we doubled the EBITDA. The recipe is a mix of vision and execution. The great European adventures that work are those where there is a pioneer country that finds a disproportionate interest.

Hello.

Well, thank you.

I think the word that best summarizes the first months of my arrival at Euronext is simply: survive. The company Euronext in 2014 after its repositioning of the CEO, after the resignation of many people who no longer believed in the project, is an extremely fragile, extremely vulnerable company. The only reason I became CEO of this company at the time is that nobody wanted the job in the literal sense and there was a feeling of very, very great vulnerability. The shareholder pact that was supposed to protect the company from a hostile takeover bid expires 12 months after my arrival. The industrial agreement with the London Stock Exchange group on the downstream part of our business called clearing expires at the end of 2017. There is real tension between the Dutch and the French, who represent the two main markets of the group. And so it's a bit complicated. We are in the process of implementing a very aggressive social plan, which had not happened in a stock exchange business for a long time. So that's the good news I just indicated. The bad news is that a few weeks after my arrival, there is an announcement of the merger between Deutsche Börse and London Stock Exchange. So I arrived in November 2015 and in February 2016 a strategic merger is announced that creates an environment of enormous pressure because it means that there will be a big Godzilla company. You have to consider that at the time the referendum on Brexit had not yet taken place. So it is natural to consider that the two big European players will merge. So that makes things very complicated and we pay the bonuses for 2015 at the end of March 2016 and the day after the bonuses my CFO resigns while we have summoned all investors for the first Capital Markets Day to present the first strategic plan 6 weeks later. So I find myself with a hostile strategic deal and no CFO and an investor day 6 weeks later.

So that's facts that make you develop a culture of survival, of agility. You have to recruit in a few days a CFO who wants to get on this boat and you have to recruit an HR director to put energy back into the organization. So we created a culture of agility, fast tracking, very rapid lateral promotions and we created a team, a commando of people who were ultimately what I call corporate refugees, people who were great but who had just had incidents and who had been fired during a merger or who were unhappy in their job because they had a new boss who was someone they didn't respect. And so we created a pack of people who were there because they had had difficulties.