Best of luck to Michel-Alain Proch, today unveiled as the next chief financial officer of the London Stock Exchange Group. He may need it.
Proch replaces the departing Anna Manz, who can expect a couple of million quid on the way out.
Proch, on a salary of £850,000, can expect the same just on the way in since he will be granted “buyout awards” to compensate for bonuses he might have got from present employer Publicis.
Truly, executive land is a whole other planet.
One issue for Proch and his CEO, the American David Schwimmer, is the perception people in the City have of what the London Stock Exchange Group does.
Mostly, it’s a data company that sells analytics tools to investors around the world. The sleepy business of running an exchange that trades shares is about 4% of the revenues of what is a giant entity with operations in 190 countries.
There’s a fairly vocal crowd in the City and a smaller one in Westminster which hates this idea. As far as it is concerned, the 300-year old LSE is at the very vital heart of everything the Square Mile does, even if the numbers indicate this is plainly no longer true
Another problem for Proch and Schwimmer is the long-standing perception that London shares are undervalued. And that all the good new floats therefore go to New York.
Schwimmer said the other day that this just isn’t so. Individual companies – lately Smurfit Kappa and YouGov, might have their own reasons for moving to Wall Street.
In general, these tend to be about more relaxed attitudes to executive pay than higher share prices though, says Schwimmer.
Proch probably doesn’t want to make his first point of business to demand that London CEOs get paid more, lest anyone thinks a man educated at Toulouse Business School rather misunderstands the concerns of the smaller brokers who feel the LSE doesn’t understand their needs.
Perhaps he and Schwimmer can do more to persuade us andCEOs looking to float that London still has nearly everything going for it.
