The name and the accent are unmistakeably French. But after a decade and a half working for US investment banks and hedge funds in London, Olivier Perquel was seen as an Anglo-Saxon hire when he joined France’s Natixis in 2009. The investment banking arm of French network Banques Populaires and Caisse d’Epargne was in need of a new mentality, after exposures to complex structured credit and correlation products caused it to lose the parents €2.6bn in 2008 and €1.7bn in 2009.
That triggered the merger of the two groups to form Groupe BPCE in 2009, and a new management team including chief executives Francois Pérol at BPCE and Laurent Mignon at Natixis.
