Ariane de Rothschild

Baroness Ariane de Rothschild (née Langner; 14 November 1965) 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.
She was married to Benjamin de Rothschild from 23 January 1999 until his death on 15 January 2021. They have four daughters.
Family.
Ariane de Rothschild was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, to a father who was a senior executive at the international pharmaceutical company Hoechst. Until the age of eighteen, Ariane de Rothschild and her brother Philippe lived with their parents in Bangladesh, Colombia and the former Zaire (DRC).
In January 1999, she married Benjamin de Rothschild, son of Edmond de Rothschild and heir of the Edmond de Rothschild Group. They have 4 daughters. Her husband, Benjamin de Rothschild died on 15 January 2021 of a heart attack.
Biography.
Education.
Ariane de Rothschild studied at Sciences Po in Paris and holds an MBA in financial management from 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 (wineries, farms, hotels, restaurants). 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 (LCF) 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 report for 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 2018, she led the acquisition of the fragrance company Parfums Caron and managed the revival of the brand.
In March 2019, the company removed Edmond de Rothschild (Switzerland) S.A. from public trading, making it entirely 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.