Taking French retail to Wall Street

In his seven years as head of French retail banking at Société Générale, Jean-Jacques Ogier turned cross-selling into an art.

In his seven years as head of French retail banking at Société Générale, Jean-Jacques Ogier turned cross-selling into an art. For one thing, he installed a sophisticated customer relationship management system to help sell auto loans, mortgages and other products to existing clients. The strategy helped the bank grow its domestic retail loan book by 75 percent, to E78 billion ($98 billion), between 1998 and 2004.

Now Ogier hopes to repeat the trick, this time as head of SG Americas, the U.S. arm of SocGen’s investment bank. “In mature markets -- whether it is French retail banking or investment banking in the U.S. -- it’s difficult to put new customers on the books,” says Ogier. “Increasing your share of current clients’ wallets only fractionally can be easier, while the revenue leverage can be tremendous.”

The 58-year-old banker, whose career at SocGen has included a series of deputy CEO postings in both corporate and retail banking in Hong Kong, Morocco and New York, took up the new post last month, replacing the retiring Jacques Bouhet. Ogier intends to build on SocGen’s position as the world leader in equity derivatives to penetrate new markets in the U.S., such as asset-backed securities and other structured products. He has his work cut out for him: SG Americas ranked 46th in U.S. debt capital markets, 20th in equity capital markets and 33rd in syndicated loans in the first eight months of this year, according to Dealogic. In Europe the firm ranks comfortably in the top 15 in those markets. But Ogier is confident that the bank can sell more products to the financial institutions that constitute the bulk of its clientele.

“To go the extra mile, we’ve got to rely on existing strengths,” he says.

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