Yves Perrier to stand down as Amundi chief

Yves Perrier is to step down as chief executive of Amundi after a decade building the French group into Europe’s largest asset manager.

The 67-year-old will be replaced by Valérie Baudson, the group’s deputy chief executive who oversaw the launch of Amundi’s exchange traded fund business. Perrier will move to become chairman in May.

Under Perrier’s leadership, Amundi’s assets under management and market value have almost doubled since its stock market flotation in Paris in 2015.

Perrier said on Wednesday that he had “complete confidence” in Baudson, who joined Amundi from Crédit Agricole Cheuvreux in 2008. “I know that I can rely on his support,” Baudson said of the outgoing chief executive.

As well as overseeing the launch of Amundi’s ETF arm, Baudson later assumed other leadership roles at the €1.7tn asset manager.

The leadership change was announced alongside Amundi’s full-year results which showed a fall in revenues, profits and investor inflows in 2020.

Adjusted net income dropped to €972m last year, down 4.7 per cent on the €1bn earned in 2019. It also fell just shy of Amundi’s target of doubling net income since its initial public offering.

The decline in profits stemmed from a 4.2 per cent drop in revenues to €2.6bn, as well as rising costs. Amundi’s cost-to-income ratio rose to 51.7 per cent in 2020, up 0.8 percentage points on the previous year.

Investor inflows dropped to €45.1bn last year, down by more than half from the record haul of €107.7bn in 2019. New business from clients in France almost doubled to €26.7bn last year but there was a marked slowdown in Asia where net inflows dropped to just €1.2bn as a result of the ending of two institutional mandates in India and withdrawals in China.

Perrier said that volatile market conditions in the first six months of 2020 had led to modest investor outflows and Amundi had then enjoyed a “particularly vigorous second half” with solid business activity across all client segments.

Amundi also announced that it would pay a dividend of €2.60 per share for 2020. The payout was suspended in 2019 in response to a call by the European Central Bank.