Chief Executive Officer
Cortal Consors
[16]

Many executives are puzzling over social media and how they will affect their businesses. For Olivier Le Grand and Paris-based Cortal Consors, it’s already old hat. The BNP Paribas brokerage subsidiary introduced Hopee, a forum for sharing investment opinions and tracking how individuals’ recommendations perform, in Germany in 2009 and in France last year. Le Grand says 87,000 members had signed on as of May; he expects a total of 130,000 by year-end, with Spain coming online this summer. About the same time, the firm plans to introduce mobile trading on the Google Android operating system, a follow-on to an iPhone application that came out in spring 2010. Le Grand, 58, whose 22-year run as CEO began before the Internet era and is sure to extend beyond Web 2.0, says Cortal Consors is seeing “a strong rebound of interest” in European markets, “especially among German investors.” First-quarter trading volume soared 120 percent year-over-year, to €29.8 billion ($42.1 billion), and 46 percent of the 8.2 million trades were booked in India, which Cortal Consors entered in 2007. The firm recently developed online services for TEB Investments in Turkey, a venture resulting from BNP Paribas’s 2009 acquisition of   Fortis.