#134 Stéphane Boujnah | Celui qui dirige la plus grande plateforme boursière en Europe

In the United States, if you want to have an income when you're old, you have to buy shares when you're young. Otherwise, you end up in the situation we see when we arrive at the airport, at LaGuardia or at Kennedy in New York: elderly people who are taxi drivers or car drivers who come to pick you up, who are quite old because they haven't saved enough, so they have to work until past 75. So in the United States, if you want to have an income when you're old, there's no other solution than to buy shares when you're young. In Europe, if you want to have an income when you're old, you just have to hope that the people around you, when the time comes, will continue to pay taxes and social contributions.

I lived in Champignol, which is a small town in the suburbs of Nancy where there is a large brewery. And then one day the French teacher summoned my mother and told her that the little one — I was 11 or 12 years old — had to study Latin. There was no Latin in the middle school where we were, so we had to go to the big city nearby, which was Nancy. So I had to get up much earlier and for years I took the bus very, very early at 6:20 a.m. And there, I was at the Jeanne d'Arc high school in Nancy, I was raised by teachers of classical letters who raised me in the sense that horses are raised in the arts. If there hadn't been this public system with these exceptional classical literature teachers, if there hadn't been a committed teacher who said, 'Look, this kid, he seems hardworking and clever, even if he seems nerdy,' I wouldn't have gotten there. When I arrived at Sciences Po, it was the same, it was almost free, but I was also studying law at the same time. I lived in 15 square meters under the roof, there was no hot water in the shower. It was hard, but it was like the vast majority of students for centuries. It wasn't easy. But above all, when there was a possible fork to go study in the United States, it wasn't possible because of money. And I went to Great Britain because in Great Britain I had a British Council scholarship that paid for everything, whereas in the United States you had to borrow. And in fact, the idea of borrowing from a bank to study is commonplace today, but it wasn't at all 40 years ago. What's hard, you see, the hardest thing finally, as always when you're a student, is the contrast with your classmates who grew up between a library and a piano and can afford things more easily.

It's nonexistent when you don't have money, when you spend every French franc or euro you have, the question of your relationship to finance doesn't exist, or else it's through credit. Yes, I mean, I should have told you a rather amusing anecdote. My relationship to finance, it was the first time that I, a little after I returned to Freshfields, I bought my first apartment for 1,500,000 francs and that was in '93. And I borrowed at the time over 15 years because it was difficult to get longer maturities at the time, at 11.5% interest because there was a lot of inflation, but 11.5%, interest rates were also very high. And I was furious because I was saying to myself, it's not possible to pay 11.5% interest. I couldn't find anything cheaper. And I called my father who can read but can't write, who left school at 13 as I told you, and I was furious. I was saying, what is this thing? And he told me, you know, the worst thing that could happen in February '93 is still much better than the best thing that could have happened to you in February 1943. So what I mean is that when you start out in life, and there I was already a lawyer, so I had a decent salary, you borrow, all your money literally goes to feed, equip and clothe your family, in conditions much better than those in which I grew up myself, but you allocate part of your income to repaying your mortgage. So you have no savings, you have no savings, you have only debt. So this question didn't arise for me before the moment when I had the possibility of having a surplus.

The knowledge, the contact with finance, it's linked to my first job as a corporate lawyer at Freshfields and in a more academic way when I did my MBA at INSEAD. But you're right, it's quite late. My first ambition had nothing to do with the business world and the world of finance. I was really in a world where the categories of philosophy, of law, of history prevailed, and not really the markets. And then my law studies and my studies at Sciences Po led me to become a corporate lawyer. There I came into contact with the reality that our clients were living, that is to say, market operations that we structured, whose risks we tried to mitigate through appropriate contractual documentation. And there we're around the year 2000 and we're talking around the year 90 even. I joined Freshfields in '91, I left in '97. When I joined the office of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who at the time was Minister of Economy, Finance and Industry, where I spent two and a half years, and it was after this very short experience that I went into investment banking. But since you're asking me the question of the first contact with markets and finance, intellectually it's probably my MBA in '90 and professionally it's from '91.

Ah, they are central. They are central. The essential part of what I do in my day is determined by habits, practices that I developed outside of finance. The concern for precision, for the exact formulation of things, that's a requirement that you develop in law firms where there isn't much room for literature and where you spend your time circumscribing notions and specifying concepts. And that, I think, if I hadn't spent six years with demanding lawyers, I would have a different practice of analysis and decision-making. The ability to make decisions. I was largely trained by Lionel Jospin, the French prime minister at the time, and by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who were very serious people, extremely serious, extremely factual. Third thing, I reminded you that I had an experience of commitment. I created SOS Racisme when I was a student in Paris because in 1985, we considered that we had to repair the world with others. It was the emergence of the National Front and the conviction that we had with a few others, that in France at least, but there was a fairly rapid European success, anti-racist ideas were in the majority and it had nothing to do with the left-right divide. There was a very large part of the republican right that was in a tradition of General de Gaulle. And the Gaullist right in France is a right that is against Vichy, against the OAS, that is to say the organization that opposed the independence of Algeria, and against Jean-Marie Le Pen. So there was an extremely broad spectrum of citizens ranging from the far left to the Gaullist right who had no sympathy for racist and xenophobic ideas. And so we were engaged in this very universalist approach. And I must say that there, when you commit to civic action, when you do that, you confront people who think radically differently from you, but radically differently from you. You take sometimes physical risks, but above all you have both the exaltation of collective action. So it's something very precious, the ability to set things in motion, to mobilize a group, and you also notice that you can be terribly alone. So in militant action, one learns solitude as much as the exaltation of the group. One learns, and then one also discovers all the human failings. It means that you discover very early on what is best and what is worst, the pettiness that exists in humans. When you live in protected environments, you perhaps have less opportunity to confront that. But there's also a last point in all these experiences, which is that you learn to do without others. I, Euronext, is a company that is now worth 15 billion euros, which was worth 1.4, 1.8 billion when I arrived. And finally, I sometimes wonder how we got there and why, when I had never been so high in anything, since just before I was an investment banker at Caisse d'Épargne. And I think one of the main reasons is that to do all this, you have to have unpleasant conversations. The difference between people who succeed and people who don't succeed in business is the propensity and the ability to have disagreeable conversations. If you prioritize the quality of the relationship with individuals over the mandate you have to create value, well, you create less value to keep your buddies. If you're obsessed with one thing, which is accomplishing the mandate you've been entrusted with, at the cost of tension with other people, you're more effective. And so to accept, to have the ability to be in tension with people to whom you say, 'Well no, we won't pay. Well no, we'll go to litigation. Well no, we have to make painful decisions right away,' etc. To be able to do all that, in reality, you just have to be comfortable with the idea of being very alone. If you need the emotional comfort of the people concerned, you won't get there. And I think this ability to be alone, to accept the harshness of decisions, and therefore to be much more effective than others at the end. It's two things. First, because you've experienced the struggles and the solitude before, and above all because you have many reference environments that have nothing to do with the world of finance. I don't seek recognition from the world of finance or the business world. By the way, you know what? I have no friends in finance and I have no friends in the business world. My best friend is a civil servant at the Ministry of Housing. My two other best friends are medical professors in hospitals. The people I live with, who I wouldn't want to think I'm not a good person, are people who don't even know, who don't even understand what I do. So, except the CAC 40, because that's in the newspaper. So it's because you don't seek recognition from the world in which you perform that you can perform better than those who are obsessed with conformity to models. Anyway, that's how I explain it. I think one can also be very comfortable in this environment when one grew up between a library and a piano. And I didn't grow up between a library and a piano. I grew up between my father, who left school at 13 in Tunisia, who arrived in France at 29 and who was a worker all his life, and my mother, who was a schoolteacher, so a modest middle class. And through my childhood, my youth, my commitments, the action I led at certain moments, the work I did, which are very, very different from all the people I meet all day long, but it goes very well. I adore them. But we live differently, we live differently. For years, I was afraid of becoming poor again one day, so that's settled. But it took time for this anxiety to evaporate. I have a cash burn that is very different from my contemporaries because the paradox is that I earn a very good living but I don't spend much because my consumption structure froze a bit on the basis of my childhood and youth memories. If you haven't gotten into the habit of spending a lot of money to buy works of art, which I don't do, to do expensive leisure activities, which I don't do, not because I'm stingy, but it's not because I don't take pleasure in it. My pleasure is on Saturday morning to go to the bookstore to buy a history book, try to read it during the weekend, often not manage to, and to go play sports and see my friends. Obviously, if that's your cash burn, you're in a different situation from someone who needs to go to expensive places, to keep up with the consumption pace of an environment that has expensive habits. So yes, the things that happen before the world of finance have an impact, and I think from the shareholders' point of view of Euronext, it's a positive impact.