He’s smart, but is he really a chief financial officer?
“For me, he wasn’t the bean-counting CFO-type” muses one former colleague of Diego De Giorgi when asked about the former investment banker’s surprise move to Standard Chartered to become group CFO.
De Giorgi became StanChart’s CFO this year in a return to front-line banking and to London, after almost five years away. A native Italian, for most of his career he was a Europe-focused financial institutions and equity capital markets investment banker at Goldman Sachs. He then occupied senior London-based roles at Bank of America’s investment bank, in its first decade after acquiring Merrill Lynch.
Speaking to Euromoney at StanChart’s headquarters in the City of London, not far from his old base at BofA, De Giorgi is as amicable and energetic as he ever was, even if the message is more technical and sometimes more guarded than when he was an investment banker.
The key thing is making sure that our network is attached to an origination machine with high returns
Like other financial institutions bankers – most obviously Andrea Orcel, a fellow Italian, now UniCredit’s chief executive officer – De Giorgi had long thought he might end up as a commercial bank executive.
