Stock market, indices, AI: the CEO of Euronext reveals all - Stéphane Boujnah

The reason I became CEO of Euronext is because nobody wanted the job. The CEO resigned six months after the IPO, which is extremely rare.

It is ultimately the largest equity market in Europe.

Undeniably. We have seen an influx of foreign investment into Europe since 2024 because people find that Europe, relative to corporate performance, is not too expensive.

We call it a bubble when it bursts. When you look at the volumes of money invested in AI, you must not confuse the fact that everyone will use AI with the fact that everyone will make money with AI.

We created a market, so you have to understand that in daily volume, it is two and a half times larger than London.

So we say president and CEO, right? No, it's a two-tier governance. So I am CEO, which is the translation of CEO, and Chairman of the Managing Board.

I am not a French-style president where you are Chairman of the Board and CEO. I am CEO and Chairman of the Managing Board, meaning the group that manages the company.

No, no, it's not. In the unified governance system, as we used to say, there is a Board of Directors with a Chairman who is sometimes Chairman and CEO. That's the famous PDG. And then in Northern Europe or the Germanic world, and in the Netherlands, you have a group of people who manage the company, which is the Managing Board. And then people who represent the shareholders and stakeholders, which is the Supervisory Board. And so the Chairman of the Supervisory Board in my company is called Piero Novion. He presides over a group of 10 people who are the members of the Supervisory Board. But the group that manages the company is the people from the Managing Board, the Executive Committee with me, and it is us who try to define the strategy and above all, who execute the strategy and manage the operations.

Operational and strategy. But it's the difference between doing and supervising. It's the difference between managing the company and representing the stakeholders, primarily the shareholders, to ensure that the governance and major strategic choices are consistent with the interests of the shareholders.

Yes, I was a banker before becoming CEO of Euronext. I ran operations for Continental Europe at Santander Global Banking and Markets. So I was an executive at a European bank which is now, by the way, the largest bank on the European continent. Before that, I did other things. I spent two and a half years in the cabinet of Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn when he was Minister of Finance in the Plural Left government of Lionel Jospin, when our deficits were at 3% and debt at 60% of GDP. And then I started my professional life as a corporate lawyer.

And I also had a stint at SOS Racisme.

Okay. We were five with Harlem Désir and a few others and Julien Dray, and we led this adventure in a context that took us very far, which was the universalism of the anti-racist struggle, which is very different from the fine slicing of daily communitarianism. But those are things that have nothing to do with Euronext.

Yes, well, it's not very far. We are a powerful continent, a prosperous continent, and a prosperous continent is a continent that manages with intelligence the cohesion of the group. You know, it's quite simple. In developed countries, you have talents that are distributed homogeneously everywhere. There are smart people and less brilliant people distributed in all families. And on the other side, there are opportunities, and so you need some political action to bring talents to opportunities and opportunities to talents, because if opportunities are managed by the same people, you get dynasties reproducing themselves and companies become less and less efficient, organizations become less and less efficient, less meritocratic, and the group ends up impoverished. And you have talents that are lost, as happened for hundreds of generations with women, since half of humanity was lost to human progress because they didn't have access. But beyond women and men, what is good, what is efficient, is that talented, clever, hardworking people, like me, my father was a worker and my mother a teacher. Now I run Euronext because people in the education system of the 70s and 80s thought it was good that hardworking and clever kids of workers could have access to higher education to come back to Euronext.

The reason I became CEO of Euronext, to speak in English, is because nobody wanted the job. No, but it's the truth. The company's history is very particular. It's a brilliant idea invented in 2000 during the period of happy globalization when Russia was in the G8, when we were discussing Turkey's accession calendar to the European Union, when we had just created the euro, when China was about to join the WTO, when Bill Clinton was negotiating with the Canadians and Mexicans the hypothesis of a single currency between the three countries, etc. It was another world. They created this prodigious idea which is a unique liquidity pool, a unique integrated market, a unique technological platform. And then this group worked very well, did many smart things, it made a few mistakes, and the main mistake it made was merging with the New York Stock Exchange in 2007. And that was a catastrophe. The group collapsed between 2007 and 2013. In 2013, it was bought by another American group that decided to keep the good assets, meaning the New York Stock Exchange, the derivatives market in London, the LIFFE, and to completely dump the European assets.

In New York, you have two big platforms, the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. And so at one point it was the same thing with the Paris Stock Exchange. At one point Euronext was called NYSE Euronext. And in 2000, what was created was the merger of the Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris stock exchanges, joined quite quickly by Lisbon. But these four platforms, when they merged with the New York Stock Exchange, were gradually neglected. The entire group saw its profitability collapse. And in 2013, a group called ICE, Intercontinental Exchange, which has nothing to do with immigration police, but is called ICE, took control of the combined entity. It kept the good assets, it picked the cherries as they say in English, meaning it kept the New York Stock Exchange, it kept the derivatives market in London called LIFFE which had been acquired by Euronext, and it decided to get rid of the European assets which were the four stock exchanges of Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Lisbon. The rotten branches, the deadwood, whatever you want to call it. And since they couldn't sell it, they decided to do what's called a Fire IPO, a desperate public listing, and they listed the company for a little less than 1.4 billion.

Fire as in fire. Yes. A desperate IPO when you're dumping the thing and it sold for 1.4 billion. Just to give you an order of magnitude, that was in June 2014. Today, we are in July 2026 and the company is worth a little more than 15 billion at the moment we speak. So, we did a little more than 10x in 11 years. But at the time this company went public, all the usual suspects, all the people who run after big jobs, nobody was a candidate because the view everyone had of the company in 2014 was that it was rather, if you're polite, you say you looked at the company with skepticism, and if you're blunt, you'd say it was a dog. And so the company was listed for 1.4 billion. The CEO resigned six months after the IPO, which is extremely rare, showing the level of confidence there was in the project, and they couldn't find anyone good. And so at the time, I was running Santander for Continental Europe. I was offered the job, and everyone discouraged me because there were lots of problems piling up. The one that wasn't yet visible and was the most serious was that in the first year, in the few weeks following my arrival, Deutsche Börse announced its merger with London Stock Exchange Group. So it hadn't even been 3 months since I arrived when we saw the prospect of creating a Godzilla company in Europe. And so 2016 was really a horrible year, but gradually we improved operational performance, the EBITDA margin which was 35%, which is a lot in absolute terms but for an infrastructure sector isn't exceptional, went up to around 65% in the most recent accounts we published. We nearly doubled the EBITDA margin. We made big acquisitions regularly. We transformed the company geographically, we may come back to that, but we went from four historical stock exchanges in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Lisbon. But in 2018, we bought the Dublin Stock Exchange. In 2019, we bought the Oslo Stock Exchange. In 2020, we bought an electricity exchange in the Nordic region. In 2021, we bought the Athens Stock Exchange, and last year in 2025, we concluded the acquisition of the Milan Stock Exchange. So the group has grown a lot and not only does it now have a market capitalization of about 15 billion euros, but above all it has distributed over its 10-11 years more than 3 billion in dividends and share buybacks. I say this because there are companies that do 10x, there are a few. There aren't many, but there are a few. But companies that do 10x while being profitable enough to distribute 3 billion to their shareholders in dividends or buybacks, there are far fewer. And above all, what I don't know of are companies that do 10x, pay more than 3 billion in dividends, and have made no asset impairments. In non-accounting terms, none of the acquisitions they made was a bad deal or was overpaid, because sometimes it's a bit of a headlong rush. You buy, you buy, you buy, you say well I increased my revenue, and at the end, in accounting terms, what we call asset impairment is when an auditor comes along and says the gap between what you said was the value of what you paid and what the performance of the asset you bought yields is such that you must recognize that part of the value in your accounts no longer exists since you didn't realize the value you said you would. And this asset impairment never happened with us, all our deals were good deals since we never impaired an asset. We never did what's called in English an impairment. We paid 3 billion in dividends and multiplied the value by 10. So Euronext as a company was deeply turned around, transformed. We went from a survivor phase to a conqueror phase and now a company that remains of course more modest than our big competitors. To give you an order of magnitude, if Euronext is worth 15 billion euros in market capitalization, Deutsche Börse is worth about 45 billion euros and London Stock Exchange Group about 40 billion euros.

No, they didn't manage to make it work because we worked hard to derail this merger. Me considering there was an existential risk.

There were many people, as happens in Paris. In Paris, there are always two groups of people. There are people who say 'But no, we're not going to take it lying down, we're not here to suffer, we're going to resist.' And then there are people who say, well, the thermal spas in central France are nice. And so there were people telling me 'Listen Stéphane, you just arrived, rather accompany this historic, inevitable movement which is the merger of Deutsche Börse with London Stock Exchange.' They are the two largest platforms, etc. And we decided, especially me, that we weren't born to suffer and that we were going to derail this transaction, and so we did, with others. We were also helped in June 2016 by Brexit, since London had decided to leave Europe. Well, London, which was the main financial center of the European Union, decided to become the main financial center of the United Kingdom.

No, the total return for shareholders, the total return, is better for us than for the others if we look from June 2014. It is true that London Stock Exchange Group made a huge acquisition buying a group called Refinitiv, which are the former businesses of Thomson Reuters, in which there are all sorts of assets, very different assets. Some of very high quality, others of slightly lower quality. It is true that there, they are encountering some difficulties because many of their assets are market data activities and there is a whole debate among investors about whether artificial intelligence will also transform data analysis activities. And as for Deutsche Börse, they have accumulated a number of quite intelligent acquisitions. The group is quite important. The core stock exchange business stayed in Germany, Frankfurt for the stock exchange and also Frankfurt for the derivatives market. But they have grown into many other activities. But in terms of return on investment, we are ahead. Since the beginning of the year, the growth of the Euronext share is around 15-16%. From memory, Deutsche Börse's is 3% less, so around 13%, and London Stock Exchange Group's since the beginning of the year is flat.

And that, everyone has their own frame of reference. The link between what I just said about credibility in business and the beginning of our conversation about engagement, is that I grew up inspired by Michel Rocard, inspired by Pascal Lamy, Nicole Notat and a few others like that. Dominique Strauss-Kahn. And it's this idea that if you respect people, tell them the truth. And because if you want them to believe what you say, you have to tell them the truth, and that I don't think cynicism or this feeling of superiority that leads to thinking you can manipulate people by telling them nonsense has the slightest chance of being effective. I don't think cynicism is a superior form of intelligence, nor that sincerity is a childish form of naivety. But with that, you know, today at Euronext, we have between 13 and 15-16 billion euros in transactions per day. To give you an order of magnitude. So the shares that are bought, sold, traded, it's only shares, there are no bonds, there are bonds elsewhere. So on shares, we are there. To give you an order of magnitude, in Frankfurt it's about 4 billion per day on shares and in London it's about 4 to 5 billion. 5 billion. So it's three times more, it's between two and three times more than London and Frankfurt.

No, on shares listed on the London Stock Exchange or shares listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. So we created a market that you have to understand is two and a half times larger than London in daily volume. If we measure another metric which is the aggregated market capitalization, meaning how much all the companies listed on the integrated European market of Euronext are worth, we are around 7 trillion. 7 trillion. 7 trillion euros, two and a half times the GDP of France. And in London, we are at about 3.3 trillion. So we are twice as big as London. I'm comparing flow and stock, but the idea is to give an order of magnitude of what it is, we are two to three times bigger on flows and two to three times bigger on stock. And when you compare to Frankfurt, it's even more significant because Frankfurt is a small stock exchange where the aggregated market capitalization is barely 2-2.5 trillion. That is, even though it's a country with a GDP of 4.5 trillion.

Where? In London and Frankfurt? But it's not much higher. The companies, I was talking about the aggregated market capitalization of companies listed on these exchanges. Because precisely, it's a question... Yes, I understand the question better, it's that the traditional stock exchange business is tiny, it's for example no more than about 6% of Deutsche Börse's activities which is made up of trading and listing businesses, the stock exchange business. And it's about the same, a bit more for London Stock Exchange Group, they have Refinitiv, they have lots of other activities. They have a clearing business with LCH, they have index businesses with FTSE, etc. On the German side, they have post-trade businesses with Clearstream in Luxembourg which they own. They have advisory businesses with ISS which advises shareholders on governance matters. They have fund distribution activities, they have index businesses with the Stoxx family, they have extremely diversified and remarkable activities. They have electricity trading activities. So what you need to understand is that we created something that on the equity class, not on all equities but on the equity class, is clearly the most powerful in Europe and which today is a tool available to all companies that want to raise equity capital to finance their risk on the continent.

Undeniably, and we did it with something very particular which is a unique technological platform that makes possible a unique order book, which allows the creation of a unique liquidity pool with harmonized rules of operation and federal governance.

The Athens Stock Exchange is not yet connected, we bought it in November 2025, we are finalizing this process. By June 2027, the connection will be complete because you have to understand that to connect an entire market, an entire community of brokers and companies to this integrated market, there are some IT adjustments, sometimes heavy, that are underway. The electricity exchange is not on the stock exchange. It's a different market. But for everything concerning equities, and the exercise with Athens as I was saying is in transition, for all these markets you have to consider that we have an integrated European market.

The CAC 40 is someone else's. No, we are administrators of the CAC 40 index. That is, and the reason why despite having a single integrated pan-European market, we have national indices, is that a portion of the investor world wants to invest in an index representative of the performance of the 40 most important companies in terms of free float and liquidity, meaning valuation available to investors and liquidity. In France, what is important to understand is that it's not automatic. Just because you are one of the 40 largest French companies or listed on Euronext doesn't mean you are automatically in the CAC 40. Two criteria: liquidity, a company with no trading volume at all, even if it's very large, couldn't enter the CAC 40 index. And a company that is very large but with a very small free float, like for example some very controlled or family-owned companies, wouldn't enter. I think in the financial sector, a magnificent company which is Amundi has a very nice market valuation but since there is little free float because it is actually controlled by the Crédit Agricole group, well it's not in the CAC. So the free float is the part that is listed. So it can be 10% for some, or generally there's an average.

No, it depends because you can have a company with a very large free float on a smaller market cap. You can have companies with a very small free float and high market cap. And so what the index measures is the investable universe. That is, I tell the rest of the world, if you buy this index, well you can have a representation of what the performance of the 40 most liquid and highest valued companies will be. The important pressure, liquidity, is the fact that you can have a large free float, a tiny free float. There are places where few people buy and sell. So there's no liquidity. You try to sell excellent companies. Besides, as soon as you go below the CAC 40, meaning the SBF 120, meaning the companies that are lower, the 80 companies south of the CAC 40, you have lots of companies that are magnificent industrial and commercial successes and who have liquidity that is still too low or who are in the process of reducing the controlled part of their capital. Which means we often have companies that haven't yet entered the SBF 120 even though they have all the attributes of excellent performance. Besides, what I must say in other terms, I would say, I want to buy shares of this company that is listed and actually nobody is selling, or conversely I have them, I want to sell them, nobody wants to buy. That's called liquidity. Exactly. That's called liquidity and that's why we want the index, the CAC 40, to reflect the investable universe, to reflect available objects.

It's a mix of two things. What you say reflects a mindset which is the main competitive weakness of this continent, it's resignation. The number of people who spend two-thirds of their time complaining and one-third trying to solve problems. And it's a mix of this attitude which takes, I've heard this 27 times in recent months, and some facts which are partial and a bit inaccurate too. And it's anyway something that can be solved and on which we work a lot. I say this because if you think everything is settled, you don't get up, you stay under the covers. I'm not one of those people.

Returning to the fundamental question beyond the attitude, the countries from which the companies most tempted to list on NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange come are countries where the market is least liquid. And so that's a fact. About two-thirds of European companies listed on NASDAQ come from three countries. The United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland. Precisely because I mentioned two of the three countries earlier, they are countries with stock exchanges that are shallow, very... Germany has always been the case. And the United Kingdom, it's the case since Brexit where it's accelerating. There's a drying up of listings. So tech companies listed in London are tempted by NASDAQ because listing in London isn't very exciting, and it's the same in Germany. We don't have this problem to the same extent. It's not non-existent but it's not at all systemic like it is in Zurich, Frankfurt, and London. I could send you something, it's that there are no listings...

Uh first, we look at things at European scale, but what I manage is when tech companies want to list in Europe, for the moment they find liquidity. There are two important nuances I want to bring. And by the way, what I find interesting is that people vote with their feet — international companies, companies that don't need certain markets, list on them. At the beginning of the year, there was a listing of the Czechoslovakian group CSG, a defense group that listed for about 25 billion euros on...