Baroness Ariane de Rothschild is a French banker, President of the board of the Edmond de Rothschild Group since April 2019. She is the first woman to run a Rothschild-branded financial institution ever. She is married to Baron Benjamin de Rothschild since 23 January 1999. They have four daughters.
Ariane de Rothschild studied at Sciences Po in Paris and holds an MBA in financial management from the Pace University in New York where she studied from 1988 to 1990.
Career
While studying at Pace, Ariane de Rothschild was a broker at Société Générale in New York City. After graduating in 1990, she joined AIG’s New York offices, and relocated to AIG’s trading floor in Paris the same year. She met Benjamin de Rothschild, a client of AIG, in 1993. After marrying Benjamin de Rothschild in 1999, Ariane de Rothschild joined the family business by taking on the management of the group's lifestyle assets. In 2006, she joined the supervisory board of LCF Edmond de Rothschild. In 2008, she was appointed a board member of the group, and vice-president in 2009. She focused her agenda on environmental and social impact investment, and on restructuring the company's scattered assets and subsidiaries. In 2010, La Compagnie Financière Edmond-de-Rothschild changed its name to Edmond de Rothschild Group. In 2014, all of the group's financial and non-financial assets were reorganized within the group's structure. In 2015, the group published a sustainability reportfor the first time. One 30 January 2015, Ariane de Rothschild became the President of the Executive Committee, overseeing the Group's operations. She was nominated to give a new impetus to the company. She brought a self-proclaimed "panache" to the spirit of the bank, sparking innovation within the group's executive lines to break the ice in the banking industry with a new leadership style. In 2016, she finalized the reorganization of the group's lifestyle assets under the brand new label Edmond de Rothschild Heritage. In March 2019, the company removed Edmond de Rothschild S.A. from public trading, making it completely 100%-held by the group. Ariane de Rothschild became Chairman of the board, and Vincent Taupin replaced her as the CEO of the group. The French business was folded into the Swiss company to simplify the organization of the group's units.
Philanthropy
From 2003 to 2011, the Ariane de Rothschild Art Prize awarded contemporary art initiatives. In 2005, as she was managing the family's non-financial assets, Ariane de Rothschild started to "professionalize" the group's philanthropic activities with the intent to develop a sustainable "return on engagement" philanthropic model. She named Firoz Ladak head of the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations. The Foundations are active in five different fields : Art and culture, health and research, philanthropy, cultural dialogue and social entrepreneurship. The Ariane de Rothschild Women's Doctoral Program in Israel was launched in 2009. It provides a full financial support and enhanced educational programs to women pursuing a doctoral program. The following year, in 2010, the Ariane de Rothschild Fellowship Program was launched to foster intercultural dialogue through social entrepreneurship and social science, especially between the Jewish and Muslim communities.
