Paris (France) (AFP) – Arriving in 2015 at the head of Euronext, Stéphane Boujnah will hand over the reins in May 2027 after having made it a leading stock market operator in eight European places.

Published on: 02/11/2026 - 16:15

The company, which notably manages the Paris Stock Exchange, announced on Monday its intention to appoint Dutchman David Knibbe, current boss of the insurer NN Group, as its head.

This appointment should be proposed at the annual general meeting of May 20, 2027.

Launched in a project to consolidate a European market considered too fragmented between numerous stock exchanges, the future director general will have to "strengthen the European capital markets and advance the European Savings and Investment Union", stated the president of the supervisory board, the Italian Piero Novelli, in a press release.

He will take the helm of a group shaped by Stéphane Boujnah, which he has continued to grow through acquisitions.

“The only reason why I became CEO (general director, editor’s note) is that no one wanted the job,” he said in an interview with AFP.

When he arrived at the head of the group in November 2015, Euronext had just experienced turbulent years.

Born in 2000 from the marriage of the Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels stock exchanges, joined by Lisbon in 2002, the company came under American control in 2007 by merging with the New York Stock Exchange. But in 2013, the American ICE bought the whole thing, kept New York and resold the European stock exchanges by putting them on the stock market themselves in 2014.

Stéphane Boujnah will accelerate the savings program initiated before his arrival. Cutting costs is "not very intellectually complicated", but it is "emotionally exhausting", he confides.

Then he buys, stock market after stock exchange: Dublin in 2018, Oslo in 2019, Milan in 2021 and Athens in 2025. Euronext now brings together eight stock exchanges and more than 1,800 listed companies.

“Rest or stay free”

In mid-September, Mr. Boujnah even judged in the Financial Times that a merger of the stock exchange activities of Euronext and Deutsche Börse, the major competitor, "would make sense".

Euronext, which has been part of the CAC 40 since September 2025, has a market value of just over 18 billion euros, compared to 1.5 billion in November 2015 when Mr. Boujnah arrived.

Born in 1964 in Albertville (Savoie), he grew up in the suburbs of Nancy, the son of a Tunisian worker and a teacher. A socialist activist from the age of 17, co-founder of SOS Racisme in 1984, he is a lawyer, advisor to Dominique Strauss-Kahn in Bercy from 1997 to 1999, then an investment banker.

His motto, borrowed from the Greek historian Thucydides, recurs in almost all his interventions. During his wishes to the press in 2025, he had barely started to quote it when the journalists present added it: “Rest or stay free, you have to choose”.

This leader can also be virulent when the debate goes beyond his framework. During a press lunch in March 2025, he publicly sharply reprimanded a Spanish journalist who had, according to him, misinterpreted his comments in January on a possible interest in the Madrid Stock Exchange.

Since the summer, he has been involved in the debate on the French debt, even if it means crossing swords with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who proposes to cancel part of the public debt. “Either he doesn’t know how it happens and so he’s wrong, or he knows how it happens and he’s lying,” he said on October 13 on France Inter.

The next day, the leader of La France insoumise responded by judging him "the worst placed to explain how public debt management is happening." “He is a speculator, a crisis profiteer and an exploiter of the people,” he said, recalling General de Gaulle’s words that “France’s policy is not done at La Corbeille”, the former floor of the Paris Stock Exchange.

Asked in January on Public Senate to answer yes or no to the question of whether he would have liked to have a leading political career, Stéphane Boujnah chose: “Yes”.

© 2026 AFP

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