French bank SocGen reshuffles management structure

[PARIS] French bank Societe Generale announced on Tuesday a wide management reshuffle in a move to reduce costs and boost synergies following two consecutive quarterly losses.

SocGen, France's third-biggest bank by market capitalisation, has struggled to perform in businesses it wants to keep, such as equities trading, a blow to the efforts of chief executive officer (CEO) Frederic Oudea to boost its profitability.

The bank cut the number of deputy chief executive roles to two from four and said it was creating new deputy general manager roles.

Severin Cabannes, who oversees the investment bank, will leave his deputy CEO position at end-2020. Philippe Heim, who is in charge of international markets, will also drop his deputy CEO role.

Slawomir Krupa, head of global banking and investor solutions for SocGen Americas, will also become deputy general manager and head of global banking and investor solutions activities globally from next year.

The wide-ranging changes will also see Philippe Aymerich, deputy chief executive officer and head of SocGen's French retail banking units, take on responsibility for all of SocGen's international retail banking and consumer credit activities.

"The objective of this new organisation is to enable us to strengthen the Group synergies and our efforts to reduce costs," Mr Oudea said in a statement.

On Monday, SocGen posted a second-quarter loss of 1.26 billion euros (S$2.04 billion).

REUTERS