Francois-Xavier d’Aligny is a Frenchmen who spent 21 years working for Deutsche Bank before recently moving to Société Générale. So besides the obvious professional motives for taking up this new challenge was he perhaps swayed by feelings of patriotism?
Not a bit of it, he says: “I have no problem saying I’m a French citizen. But I’m also very Firmly a European. I’m very much motivated by the idea of being one of numerous people who are trying to build the whole European process.”
This is not, perhaps, a particularly startling line for an investment banker who has spent much of his life setting up cross-border deals. But in d’Aligny’s case the averred lack of national pride in his new job does somehow ring true. Besides his 21 years with Deutsche, his cosmopolitan outlook has presumably been extended by marriage to an Austrian he met during a stint advising the French embassy in Vienna in the 1970s. His three children are trilingual, speaking English to each other, French to their father and German to their mother – they can also get by in Spanish.
D’Aligny’s internationalism stems from his childhood. Born in Paris in 1951, the eldest of six children of an officer in the French army, he spent much of his youth living abroad, following his father’s postings around North Africa and Europe.
By the time he was 20, and a student at the prestigious ESCP business school in Paris, a love of Wagner had persuaded him to take up studying German at the Goethe Institute, so that he could make sense of the words.
He began his banking career in 1973 as a junior coverage officer with Banque Hervet in Paris. From 1977 until 1979, instead of military service, he was seconded to the French diplomatic service as a Financial and commercial adviser to the French ambassador in Vienna. He then returned to Banque Hervet for six more months before deciding that he wanted more opportunities to use his English and German. D’Aligny answered a newspaper advertisement to join Deutsche Bank as a commercial banker in Paris. France was at that time already a tough marketplace for foreign banks, but it was about to get much tougher.
The election in 1981 of president François Mitterrand ushered in a programme of nationalization, which in the banking sector meant that foreign banks would be even more hard-pressed to compete with French counterparts than was previously the case
Most foreign banks, including Deutsche, reduced the size of their French operations at this time.
But the programme also presented opportunities to raise Finance for the French state to help fund the newly nationalized companies. And it was to help run Deutsche Bank’s ultimately very successful drive to win these mandates that d’Aligny was despatched to Frankfurt in 1983.
He was the only foreigner at that time at Deutsche’s headquarters to have been brought in from one of Deutsche’s foreign branches. The change from the highly regulated banking environment in Paris to the Financial markets of Frankfurt, where, as d’Aligny recalls, “there seemed to be no rules” was a very striking one, and something he relished.
In 1986, he went to London to set up a capital markets business for Deutsche, and in 1989 he was given the additional role of helping to launch the bank’s investment banking operation in Paris. In 1991 he moved to Paris to concentrate full time on this latter job, and he would remain there for the next decade.
Throughout this period, d’Aligny reported directly to members of the main board in Frankfurt. He oversaw the transformation of Deutsche’s Paris operation from that of a branch active almost exclusively in commercial banking to an active investment banking unit, with an impressive team of specialists and very good connections to French corporates.
In the past three years, Deutsche has established itself as one of the leading non-French banks in the Paris markets.
Towards the end of the 1990s, d’Aligny began to think in terms of “moving in a more entrepreneurial direction”. For some time he explored a range of possible career moves well away from banking (including going to work for a dot com, a path he may now be glad that he did not pursue). But when he was contacted by Société Générale, he found the oVer “extremely difficult to decline”. Having looked at the French banking environment from a non-French perspective, he says he’d reached the conclusion that SocGen was a “very convincing banking institution”, particularly in areas such as equity derivatives, M&A advisory, structured Finance and foreign exchange.
He was further persuaded by the fact that he knew many people who are now his colleagues at SocGen, and the job of developing contacts at board level with the main corporates in German-speaking Europe Fitted well with his previous experience.
The consensus among those who know him suggests that he is indeed the man for the job. “Managing client relationships is what he does best,” says a former colleague. “He’s a generalist, a client person, a particularly good communicator not just with clients but also with his own people.”
But he is also apparently not to be trifled with. “He’s a very strong character, very persuasive” says another who knows him well. “He doesn’t like to give up and he doesn’t like to compromise.”
D’Aligny is the First senior investment banker that Société Générale has hired to cover German-speaking Europe, but he is expected to be followed by more in the coming months.
