Anyone who encounters a Frenchwoman with steel-blue eyes somewhere in the Netherlands on a weekend in the coming years could well come face to face with the chairman of ABN Amro. At least, if Marguerite Bérard follows the advice of her neighbor in Paris, Stéphane Boujnah, the boss of the pan-European stock exchange Euronext.
Bérard and Boujnah regularly meet each other when he walks the dog and she runs. He advised her to take the car every weekend in the Netherlands. To Maastricht, Texel, Groningen, Delft or Utrecht. To get to know the country and Dutch culture well. He did that himself when he lived in Amsterdam for a year for Euronext.
Boujnah would not be surprised if Bérard (1977) follows his advice. According to the top boss of Euronext, which also includes the Amsterdam stock exchange, Bérard is very curious: she wants to get to know the culture in which she works and the people around her and understand what concerns them. “She told me that she also wants to learn Dutch immediately. She had already started with the ‘nuns’, she said.”
Few people around her would have thought that Bérard would seek refuge outside France. She grew up in the French political and business elite and is a big name within it. She could probably have lived for years on the successes she has already achieved.
Her paternal grandfather, her father and her mother studied at the elite institute École nationale d’administration (ENA). Her father became prefect of a French region. Her mother was an advisor to Health Minister Simone Veil (who legalized abortion in France) and an advisor to President Jacques Chirac in the 1980s. Then, as a descendant of a Russian Jew who fled with an interest in doing business in Eastern Europe, she switched to the banking sector.
Marguerite Bérard followed in the footsteps of her parents, especially her mother. She studied in Paris and Princeton, and was the best student of her class at ENA in 2004. That generation produced, among others, the current French President Emmanuel Macron and several other high-ranking bankers. Under her leadership, the class presented a twenty-page indictment against the program to the director during the graduation ceremony. According to them, the ENA mainly produced a civil servant elite disconnected from everyday life. Under Macron, the school was reformed and renamed.
Despite this criticism, Bérard did follow the classic path to high civil service. She became a financial inspector, after which she served as advisor to President Nicolas Sarkozy and chief of staff to the Minister of Labor. In 2012 she switched to the private sector. At the merged bank Banquepopular-Caisse d’épargne (BPCE), she became responsible for strategy and legal affairs just below the board, after which she was given the same portfolio on the board in 2016.
In 2018 she left for BNP Paribas, the largest bank in France. There she became responsible for national retail activities (consumers, companies and private banking). In that role, she was in charge of 28,000 employees and 1,870 branches – more than the 20,000 FTEs and 25 branches that ABN Amro has today. Her task at BNP Paribas: digitize and streamline activities.
According to a former direct employee of this French bank, who wishes to remain anonymous because she still works there, Bérard was able to oversee the strategy as well as succeed operationally. “She is a very complete manager. She knows how to set the bar high in both areas. In addition, she can deal well with large customers and knows a lot about what is involved in banking.”
Impatient
Her departure came as a surprise last year. BNP Paribas only briefly reported that Bérard was resigning to do “professional projects elsewhere.” According to the French business newspaper Les Echos may have played a role in the period she had to observe before she was allowed to work at another bank. If ABN Amro receives permission from regulators and shareholders to appoint Bérard in April, one year will have passed.
Bérard has not yet said why she wanted or had to leave. It may have been a factor that its retail bank, which is extra sensitive to interest rate developments due to French legislation, lagged behind in terms of results. However, within Paris’s business elite, the story is circulating that Bérard was mentioned a little too often as his successor in the eyes of BNP’s current chairman, Jean-Laurent Bonnafé. He might not have tolerated a nice, firm and competent female top executive knocking on the door. Perhaps Bérard himself was also impatient: the 63-year-old Bonnafé wants to stay on until 2028.
Boujnah from Euronext thinks that Bérard will have no difficulty integrating into the Netherlands, even if learning the language is not immediately possible. “I know the cultural nuances between France and the Netherlands. Bérard is very direct.” He laughs: “In a certain way she is even Dutch. I think she is a perfect fit.”
Former ENA classmate Luis Vassy, French ambassador to the Netherlands from 2019 to 2022, also thinks so. “She is extremely suitable for the pragmatic, business culture in the Netherlands. I think she is the type that Dutch people like.” According to Vassy, in addition to being extremely smart, Bérard is easy-going and interested in people. “At our school, even though she was the best, she was extremely popular.”
Boujnah calls ABN Amro’s choice for Bérard cool. After all, she will be the first female chairman of the board of a Dutch consumer bank and one of the first female bank CEOs in Europe. On the other hand, he doesn’t think so at all bold move. “She is simply one of the best leaders, a really good banker. She knows the regulators in Frankfurt and can deal with the government. I have already jokingly said that they are ABN Amro ‘great again‘ is going to make.”
Assignment
What would ‘make it great again’ mean according to the commissioners who want to appoint Bérard? In recent years, ABN Amro has slimmed down enormously under the leadership of Robert Shaak. International activities were reduced, branches closed. The bank is now concentrating on Northwestern Europe.
Perhaps Bérard will be instructed to get the bank in better order operationally and to develop some new activities. The former is necessary in risk management, among other things, complained chairman De Swaan in the latest annual report. There may soon be some room for the second, as the state plans to further reduce its stake in the bank.
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Shaak will not complete his term as chairman of the supervisory board, it was announced last year, so that his successor will have time to think about a “strategic reconsideration” for the bank. Although it was immediately stated that there will be no completely new strategy for the bank. Perhaps its profile can be sharpened, next to European tech bank ING and food & agriculture-bank Rabobank. More support for national innovation is an option; in France, Bérard regularly emphasized this as an important role for BNP Paribas.
Or perhaps the Frenchwoman sees an opportunity to turn ABN Amro into a greener bank. At a conference in 2020, she mentioned the key problem for banks in the coming years: “That is climate change. How it affects our business and our customers, and how we finance the required change. It’s about changing fixed patterns that people and companies have: how do we achieve that?”