Most chief executives might be tempted by the limelight if they had spent more than a decade running the eurozone’s biggest bank and outperformed regional rivals blighted by crises.
Not Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, who if anything has retreated farther from view in his 12 years in charge of BNP Paribas.
“I’m just the one who succeeded someone else,” the 61-year-old told the Financial Times in a rare interview in Paris. “The bank was incorporated in 1848 and is here to stay for a very long period of time. This is a team.”
But although he may prefer to hide from view, Bonnafé has a set of challenges that will eventually define his record at the French bank — not least that of assuring his own succession, even if BNP’s bylaws allow him to stay on until 2028.
During a tenure that has included the eurozone crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, BNP’s shares have held up better than most of its European peers but its price-to-book ratio of 0.54 lags behind those of some, including HSBC and Santander and particularly most big US lenders.
The bank has cemented its status as one of Europe’s top corporate financiers and is further bolstering its ambitions as the continent’s go-to investment bank, beating one-time potent rivals Deutsche Bank and Barclays by revenue, although Wall Street banks remain by far the market leaders.
As he looks to deliver on a promise of higher returns over the next two years, Bonnafé must now prepare BNP for a greener makeover — a source of growing scrutiny as climate campaigners who accuse it of not dropping fossil fuels fast enough bring lawsuits against the bank and plaster the elusive chief executive’s face on protest posters.
At the same time, BNP has a “steady-as-she-goes” reputation to uphold, with a streak of regular quarterly profits over the past decade marred only by the $9bn in penalties the bank faced for US sanctions-busting in 2014.
“In a sector in which it’s tough to sleep easy, BNP is seen as a higher-quality, safer organisation,” said Barclays analyst Amit Goel.
Bonnafé is more positive than some peers about the threat posed to banks by the rapid reversal of ultra-low interest rates in Europe and the US, with the industry having ratcheted up its defences and regulatory buffers since the 2008 financial crisis.
That is despite growing warnings of a looming plunge in commercial real estate and company valuations, the collapse this year of Californian lender Silicon Valley Bank and the forced takeover of long-suffering Credit Suisse by its Swiss rival UBS.
“So far, yes, there were some isolated issues, but no major global problem,” Bonnafé said, adding: “I am a bit conflicted to say this is great, but if we try to look calmly at the situation maybe 15 years before, the system would be in a very different shape.”
In his time running BNP, calmness has been among Bonnafé’s trademarks.
“He’s always been very self-contained,” said Olivier Andriès, chief executive of jet engine maker Safran and a former classmate both at the Polytechnique engineering school and the elite Corps des mines, a training ground for French civil servants. “I’ve never known him to fly off the handle.”
BNP insiders and rival bankers credit Bonnafé for creating a tightly managed operation that has proved conservative on risks and costs, with some describing a highly hierarchical internal culture.
While French media have cited one of his nicknames as J’Lo, a riff on his shared initials with US pop star Jennifer Lopez, some employees raised less flattering monikers — including “the Supreme Soviet”.
Bonnafé’s reserve goes beyond his public persona, even if he is no stranger to establishment circles. Some French officials said he was a mystery to them, an anomaly for the head of a lender that was state-owned until the year he joined in 1993 — at the start of a wave of French privatisations — and remains a go-to bank for the French government.
BNP, which has remained France’s dominant primary dealer for government bonds, was instrumental in orchestrating emergency state-backed loan schemes funnelled via French banks during the pandemic.
Born to a family from the southern city of Albi, Bonnafé initially followed in his EDF engineer father’s footsteps in his studies.
At Polytechnique, a recruiting ground for blue-chip French companies, he rubbed shoulders with other future European bank bosses including Tidjane Thiam of Credit Suisse, Jean Pierre Mustier of UniCredit and Société Générale’s Frédéric Oudéa.
A lover of classical music, one of Bonnafé’s few public pursuits is as head of the Friends of the Paris Opera, where he entertains big clients. Another yearly outing is the Roland-Garros tennis tournament. However, people who know him professionally struggle to detail how he spends his downtime.
“He’s an introvert,” said one senior banker who has known him for years. “He’s not going to tell you what he did on the weekend, or only if you really force him.”
Corporate bosses are more forthcoming. Bonnafé’s first job at BNP was to manage big clients, after a stint at France’s ministry of industry and in private equity.
Arthur Sadoun, who once advised BNP on campaigns as a publicist, said Bonnafé gave him counsel when he became chief executive of advertising group Publicis in 2017.
“He spent a lot of time telling me ‘it will be hard but you’ll get there’.”
Rodolphe Saadé, head of Marseille-based shipping group CMA CGM, described Bonnafé as a straight talker: “He says things the way he sees them . . . when something is not possible he’ll say so”.
Bonnafé made his mark at BNP pursuing some of its biggest mergers, including a double bid for SocGen and Paribas in 1999 when he was head of strategy. The first offer was eventually dropped.
He later helped integrate Italy’s Banco Nazionale di Lavoro, which BNP acquired in 2006, as well as Fortis’s operations in Belgium and Luxembourg. Internally, he has made little secret over how laborious the BNL deal was, after BNP had to grapple with its poor quality loan book — a cautionary tale for other cross-border mergers.
Bonnafé has since favoured smaller deals, including the 2019 purchase of Deutsche Bank’s prime brokerage operations that serve hedge funds, to boost its standing in equities markets.
He has insisted a €7.6bn war chest set aside from the $16.3bn sale of US retail business Bank of the West will be spent on IT and system upgrades and incremental acquisitions to build up scale in areas such as asset management, insurance and consumer finance.
A diversified business, from car leasing group Arval to a wealth management arm, has also helped BNP’s steady growth. BNP used its balance sheet aggressively during the pandemic, expanding it by €500bn in mere months, to win over loan-starved corporate clients across Europe when US rivals temporarily retrenched.
The group reported a record €10.2bn annual profit in 2022.
When asked where he and the bank might go from here, Bonnafé shifted to the much broader challenge lenders face in serving societies that must rapidly transition to cleaner energy models.
He wants the bank to be at the forefront of clients’ financing needs for new infrastructure, and insisted BNP was now reducing its support to the oil and gas sector — albeit at its own pace, and not one that he said could “kill the economy”.
“There’s a lot to do,” Bonnafé said. “The last time was maybe just after the second world war if you look at the magnitude of what we need to invest to implement the transition.”
How long he will stay on to see that through is unclear. No dauphin has yet been anointed at a bank that has tended to promote from within.
In the words of one rival banker, “the only real thing Bonnafé has left to prove is to succeed in his exit, and leave at the right time before it’s deemed too long”.
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