TIDJANE THIAM, 54
CHIEF EXECUTIVE, CREDIT SUISSE
SHOULD there have been any doubts about Tidjane Thiam’s place among the global power elite, they were surely dispelled at the World Economic Forum. As George and Amal Clooney posed for the cameras, there standing coolly beside them in Davos was the charismatic Credit Suisse chief, grinning like a preening cat who’s just discovered a stash of double cream.
Is there any other figure from the iffy (PR-wise) world of banking this peculiar power couple would not have minded being seen with? Unlikely. But Thiam has long transcended that previously unbridgeable divide between high finance and showbusiness.
Handsome, smooth as a panther’s fur with the frame of a basketball player, his social milieu ranges from Bob Geldof and Roger Federer to ex-UN chief Kofi Annan.
Colleagues describe him as having ‘the brain the size of two solar systems who can charm the pants off people’. Look out!
Thiam’s dizzying rise from Ivory Coast beginnings to head of one of the world’s biggest investment banks has contained more drama than a Jeffrey Archer potboiler. HE WAS the youngest of seven children, and his father flitted between being a government minister and political prisoner, depending on who was in power.
At 20, he fulfilled his pa’s ambition of sending a son to Paris’s prestigious Ecole Polytechnique (his brothers, who had failed to get there, teasingly nicknamed him l’ultime espoir – the last hope).
There, his razor- sharp intellect was matched only by an intense competitiveness. Contemporaries recall him weeping bitterly at his baccalaureate results, after failing to gain a distinction.
He landed a job with consultants McKinsey in Paris, then London, with a year’s sabbatical at the World Bank in between. In 1994 he declined a lucrative offer from Goldman Sachs to accept a government job in his homeland.
Thiam’s arrival coincided with economic chaos. Four years later there was a military coup while he was in Paris. Defying both French PM Lionel Jospin and his own wife, Annette, he went home and spent weeks under house arrest.
He told Desert Island Discs in 2012: ‘I lost everything. For six months, I had no job, no career, nothing. It taught me a lot about myself. If you’ve been in a situation where you have nothing, there’s nothing much you’re afraid of.’
Fortunately, he was able to rejoin McKinsey, and after two years was lured to London to work for Aviva by its then chief executive Richard Harvey. Initially, Thiam was reluctant to make the move, worried that his spoken English wasn’t up to scratch. Harvey advised him to watch re-runs of Yes, Minister and listen to The Archers and Desert Island Discs.
The affection he grew for the capital remains. Along with his two sons, he still supports Arsenal, once rebuking its manager Arsene Wenger in person over his squad. In 2007, he joined Prudential as chief financial officer before being named chief executive in 2009, making him the first black leader of a FTSE 100 company. BUT despite trebling the value of the insurer, his tenure was fraught with tension. After irritating shareholders by trying to join the French bank Société Générale as a non- executive director, he embarked on a failed £23.5bn takeover of Asian insurer AIA in 2010.
Investors baulked. The backlash was fierce. Friends say he was shocked at the personal vitriol. He was lucky to survive the fallout.
Do these incidents betray perhaps a sense of arrogance? He’s certainly not short of confidence.
When Credit Suisse came knocking in 2015, he suggested to Pru chairman Paul Manduca he might be persuaded to stay if he was given access to a private jet. Manduca’s response was clear: ‘You’re good, but you’re not that good.’
There has been hostility, too, at Credit Suisse, where he is in the midst of a restructuring pro- gramme. There was anger over his pay this week, which he has slashed to £7.9m, a still-astronomical sum for a bank that lost £2bn last year.
Whether he sees his turnaround plans through is moot. He remains popular in the Ivory Coast, where his celebrity outstrips even that of its star footballer, Didier Drogba.
Some wonder if this treasured son might one day return, perhaps in another political capacity.
President Thiam has a certain ring to it, n’est-ce pas?