The engaged investor activating change
LOCATION: Paris, France
LANGUAGES SPOKEN: French and English
CURRENT ROLES:
Co-founder, CIAM
Chair of the Board, Physitrack PLC
PREVIOUS LEADERSHIP ROLES:
Portfolio Manager, Head of Equity Event Driven Strategies, Systeia Capital Management (Amundi)
Manager, PwC
BOARDWAVE ROLE: Mentor
Co-founder of the female-led French investment firm CIAM and one of the top 100 influential women in European finance according to Financial News, Anne-Sophie d’Andlau is on a mission. “When people tell you that what you want to do is impossible, what do you do? Does it stop you or does it motivate you to continue and really do what you want to achieve?” she says.
D’Andlau falls defiantly into the latter category: she was one of the first women at France’s first hedge fund, Systeia Capital Management, and completed a six-year stint at PwC, mainly in New York. And in 2010, she co-founded CIAM with Catherine Berjal, determined to do business differently. “In 2008, we were two women in the male-dominated industry of finance. We didn’t have a lot of backers to fund our ventures. But we had determination, experience, willingness to succeed, a taste for facing challenges, and a drop of recklessness. We quit our jobs, took a deep breath, and that’s how CIAM was founded.”
Much of CIAM’s success has come from the pair’s unique approach. “We had an activist strategy: we would challenge the French establishment and other continental European establishments. We decided to engage with businesses ina very active manner,” she explains. This meant engaging with boards to make an impact, but also challenging DEI, and prioritising environmental and social issues. In fact, you can read the pair’s intent in the business name: CIAM stands for Charity Investment Asset Management. The company also donates up to 25% of its performance fees to charity.
Despite the success of the approach, D’Andlau says the term needs explaining. “To put the tag of activist on us is saying these guys are not regular asset management. It can be negatively connotated, a term given to people who seem quite dogmatic about situations, whereas that was absolutely not true in our case. Everything we did was pragmatic,” she says. “We encourage companies to improve their strategies on matters. It’s what we call responsible activism.”
D’Andlau’s campaigns for change have earned her a roster of groundbreaking achievements: CIAM has taken on – and defeated – corporate behemoths including The Walt Disney Company, Dutch retailer Ahold Delhaize, and French insurance company SCOR. “Our most emblematic campaign that really put us on the radar was Disneyland Paris. At the time, Euro Disney (as it was known then) had lost 99% of its value since its IPO. Minority shareholders had lost everything basically. We got interested because we could see that there were problems of governance between the parent company, Walt Disney, and its European subsidiary. There were contracts that were draining the daughter company of almost all its cash every year and we decided to speak up. We actively campaigned and our engagement paid off. The share price went up 65% off the back of that.”
Inspired from an early age
Entrepreneurship runs in D’Andlau’s blood: her grandfather was a business owner who taught her some valuable lessons. “He gave me this strength to say you can take risks in your life, and that’s okay. You take risks and you shouldn’t be afraid ofit not working because that is how you learn and that’s how you progress.”
As the co-founder of CIAM, there is a lot of risk involved butit is risk that is both well-managed and thoroughly thought through. “We engage in a very active manner with corporates, ranging from their strategy, financials and balance sheets, to governance, and environmental and social matters.”
“It’s easier not to engage but then it’s a wait-and-see type strategy. That’s not interesting to us. What is very exciting about what we do is that you establish a relationship with the company, with its top management and board members.”
That said, she doesn’t shy away from rolling her sleeves up and getting involved in the businesses CIAM supports. “We’re not saying we need to be involved on a day-to-day basis but we need to ask questions. We believe that it is nice to have active and engaged shareholders. In some instances, we have been public with our engagement, meaning we went to the other shareholders involved. We challenged some of the resolutions during general assemblies. We’ve been adding pressure for change.”
She may not want the activist tag in business, but she admits that when she was a child she could be “a bit vocal around my friends about how teachers were behaving at school”. This came from an innate sense of fairness and justice, she says, partly driven by her own upbringing.
D’Andlau says that she had a “lucky childhood”, not least because she was given the same education as her two brothers, something she calls “a gift”. This is something she is passionate about seeing for others. She also had a role model of independence in her mother, and a very demanding father, who instilled a strong work ethic.
“I took part in a lot of swimming competitions when I was younger. My father would bring me to the competitions at 6am on a Sunday morning. I was not super happy about going. But I went and it gave me a lot. You can’t get away with things, you have to put energy into them.”
Making space for women
She put the same effort into her studies, and earned a place at the prestigious NEOMA Business School in France and went on to work at PwC. While at the firm, she spent three years in New York. She arrived in 1998 at the height of the dot-com boom, and played an active role in the due diligence for several tech IPOs, including iVillage, a women’s lifestyle website. “It was a really interesting time. It opened a new world in front of me, and the American way of thinking, where nothing is really impossible,” she says.
The entrepreneur moved back to France, when she was approached to take part in the launch of the country’s first hedge fund, Systeia, in 2001. “I dived into the financial markets, a world that was very different to the one I was in before but I very much enjoyed it.” She is very aware that both finance and tech are male-dominated industries, and she acknowledges that being a woman in both made it “really tough”. “It’s a boy’s club. There are a lot of men in those two industries so it is easier to bring in people who are alike,” she says.
“Some women think it is not for them because it will be too difficult to marry their personal life and their working life. It’s a question of education, young girls have to understand that nothing is off limits.”
D’Andlau joined forces with Catherine Berjal in 2010 to create CIAM. She admits it was an uphill struggle to prove themselves as women. “It was probably more difficult than if we were two guys. But at the same time, we have shown a younger generation of women that it is possible. Times are changing, and they’re changing quite rapidly.”
But, she adds, it wasn’t a conscious choice to partner with a woman. “It was more linked to Catherine’s personality and skills, which I found very complementary to mine. I could see that she was the right person and, 15 years later, we are still working together, so I was right.”
D’Andlau is very happy to be referred to as a feminist. “I don’t shy away from saying I’m a feminist. I’m convinced about equality of chances – we should have the same chances,” she says. Her firm has parity between men and women, and also spends time coaching young women who join the firm, and asking for their feedback.
Sketching out the future
While the tech and finance worlds have much in common,one of the key differences in the tech industry is its abilityto collaborate – something D’Andlau is pleased to see Boardwave pushing forward. “Boardwave is a great example of that. It shows that in this very demanding industry, there is still room for collaboration. And I think that’s a very important message of hope for the younger generation. You are going to have to work a lot, but you are going to get support.” D’Andlau was introduced to Boardwave by Henrik Molin, the co-founder and CEO of Physitrack, a very successful healthtech company, which she is now chairing.
As someone who “understands the stock markets pretty well, and how investors behave”, D’Andlau shares the very practical initiatives Molin shared with Boardwave members and key steps for the creation of a Pan-European equity market. “We are going to be stronger as the European region if we have a common stock exchange for tech companies. Nasdaq First North, which was born in Sweden, is a good start. But if we want to revive stock markets in Europe, one solution is for the tech industry to lead the charge with something like an expansion of the Nasdaq First North.”
D’Andlau’s role at CIAM, and the various roles she takes on– she is also board chair of Physitrack, a cloud-based patient engagement solution – leave her little free time but she remains a great believer in maintaining a work-life balance.
In fact, it would be one of her key pieces of advice to budding entrepreneurs. “Continue to have hobbies, moments when you can escape and think about something else.” Her own escapeis through her large collection of comics from Europe, Japan and America. “It’s just amazing what you can find in terms of scenarios and the art, it’s mind-blowing. I like that it brings you into new worlds and dimensions, or ideas that you never thought about. It is pure creativity for me.” D’Andlau even runs a comic book club, and always makes time in the week for reading comics. “Everyone knows that, on Sunday afternoon, I am
going to read my comic books and that I’m not available.”
Tips From The Top
What are your tips for a successful business?
1. Persevere, believe in yourself, never let go, failures will come along the way, learn from them and stay enthusiastic.
2. Choose your business partners and team with care, so that they are as complementary as possible to you, trustworthy, and authentic. They need not be your best friends originally.
3. Maintain outside hobbies, essential for your physical and mental health and creativity.
What is the best advice you’ve been given?
You can create a great business even in a challenging environment. This came from my grandfather, who was also an entrepreneur. It taught me resilience and perseverance.
Can you tell us something surprisingabout yourself?
I am a big fan of comic books. I read a lot of books as a teenager and also started reading comic books at the same time. About 10 years ago,I created a comic book club. We gather every quarter, a bit like a book club would do.
If you hadn’t become an entrepreneur, what career would you have pursued?
I wasn’t born an entrepreneur but I became one after 15 years in the corporate world (PwC and Credit Agricole Bank). If I hadn’t been an entrepreneur, I would probably be working in education or arts, and be more involved in charities.
Is there a piece of tech, other than your phone, that you could not live without?
Is there really another tech apart from a phone?I spend a lot of time with my headphones, because I listen to podcasts and music. As I travel a lot, they are my best companion.
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