SocGen Reshuffles Management, Deputy CEO Severin Cabannes to Step Down

French banking giant Société Générale, popularly known as SocGen, is making major changes to its senior management following two consecutive quarterly losses.

As announced earlier today, the bank’s deputy chief executive, Severin Cabannes, will retire by the end of this year. Currently, he is overseeing SocGen’s investment banking division.

In 2001, he joined the bank and rose to the most senior position by 2018, after spending years in the bank’s control functions.

Another deputy CEO, Philippe Heim, who was in charge of international markets, has also stepped down from his position.

Concurrently, the third-largest French bank is reducing its four deputy CEO roles to only two positions. Thus, the bank is creating new deputy general manager roles.

Distribution of Major Responsibilities Within the Bank

Apart from the cuts, Slawomir Krupa, who currently heads SocGen’s global banking and investor solutions in the Americas, will be appointed as the bank’s deputy general manager next year. Presently, his existing role, for the American subsidiary, will also be extended to the bank’s global operations.

Philippe Aymerich, another SocGen deputy CEO, is at this time heading its French retail banking units. He will take over all the bank’s international retail banking and consumer credit activities.

Additionally, Heim’s responsibilities for financial services and insurance will be taken over by Diony Lebot, another deputy CEO at the French bank.

“I wanted to assemble a renewed management team with diversified and strengthened banking skills,” Frédéric Oudéa, chief executive officer at SocGen, said. “Together, we will focus on accelerating the transformation of our business to better serve our clients, particularly in capital markets and retail banking, in an economic environment impacted by the COVID crisis and in a broader context of technological shift and of increased responsibility for banks to finance the positive transformations of economies.”

The need for the overhaul was accelerated by the bank’s recent financials for the second quarter of 2020. This showed a loss of 1.26 billion euros ($1.5 billion).