Deutsche Börse Group head Werner Seifert is on a road show this month, but he isn’t singing the German exchange’s praises to investors or companies interested in listing their shares. Instead, he’s entertaining jazz aficionados at German nightclubs with his 1959 Hammond B3 organ.
Talk about a double life: By day the CEO of Europe’s biggest exchange operator, Seifert at night becomes the keyboardist in the Big Brazz Pack, a group of 19 professional jazz musicians from the Frankfurt area. The group just cut its first CD, Santa Claus is Jammin’ into Town, a collection of Christmas songs, bankrolled by Seifert. They plan to sell it at gigs in cities like Berlin and Frankfurt as well as in record shops and through Amazon.com. “We are not expecting a gold album, but we are aiming for critical recognition,” explains Seifert, 55.
The goal with the Christmas CD, he adds, was to “dig deep to pull out boogaloo, blues and salsa” from such classics as “Frosty the Snowman.”
The Swiss-born Seifert first sat down to a piano at age four. As a teenager he played Germany’s club circuit as part of Appleton, a Beatles-inspired band that won a modest following. To the applause of his parents, he chose business school over the pursuit of stardom. After earning a Ph.D. in business and political science at the University of Hamburg in 1978, Seifert went on to become a McKinsey partner before leaving in 1987 to run Swiss Re’s general insurance operations. In 1993 he accepted an offer to head Deutsche Börse.
Seifert says there are parallels between his two worlds: “In the best jazz bands, just as in highly successful and flexible companies, a theme is played only once or twice and then handed to a soloist who must creatively improvise on it.”
