TOP 100 | LEADERS

Title: Chief Executive Officer Company: BNP Paribas Industry: Banking

Europe keeps asking where its banking champion is and keeps overlooking the answer. Jean-Laurent Bonnafé has run BNP Paribas since 2011, compounding steadily while rivals restructured or imploded. The eurozone’ s largest lender picked over the wreckage others left, absorbing AXA Investment Managers and financing the continent’ s industry when American banks turned cautious. A polytechnicien who maps the bank like an engineer, he prefers execution to interviews, to his own press team’ s occasional surprise. The strategy has produced what Brussels claims to want, a European bank built to global scale.

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