Rolet departs transformed London Stock Exchange with éclat

Comment Martin Flanagan

He may have missed a big penalty earlier this year. But that aside, Xavier Rolet at the London Stock Exchange has played an absolute blinder.

Those with little sense of proportion would carp that Rolet blotted his copybook by failing to pull off the £ 21 billion merger with the Frankfurt stock exchange earlier this year. That ambitious deal was meant to provide a game- changing counterweight to the major American bourses. But the derailment was due to the Europe - an Commission getting the vapours about more localised competition issues.

Rolet has transformed the London exchange, which was not exactly faltering but had a vague sense of drift, when he took over nine years ago, particularly as the golden fleece of the Liffe derivatives market had fallen into foreign hands. Would the LSE suffer a similar fate?

Paris- born Rolet had other ideas. He pulled off a string of acquisitions, including the Italian stock exchange, LCH- Clearnet, the pre- eminent clearing house, and Russell, the stock index compiler. Rolet was alive to the changing consolidation landscape in the industry.

He inherited an LSE worth £ 800 million and transmogrified it into a business worth £ 14bn, and still the epicentre of the world’s financial markets, Brexit or no Brexit.

Frustrated in his Frankfurt vision, there has been no let- up in the London exchange’s organic growth. Alongside news yesterday that Rolet is to depart in late 2018 came a trading upate showing the organisation’s revenues jumped 18 per cent to £ 443m in its third trading quarter.

Perhaps the one downside to Rolet’s extraordinary achievements, which were garnished with a modest business demeanour for the ego- centric business world, are that his are very big shoes to fill.

LSE chairman Donald Brydon will face a tough challenge in finding someone with both the flair for the big picture and operational nous.

The Frenchman has also achieved so much on the consolidation front that Brydon will have some difficulty in persuading any successor that there is much more to be done there.

That is for another day. For a true champion of Britain’s financial industry interests, Rolet just deserves a major “merci beaucoup”.