I particularly like something François Truffaut once said: life has a lot more imagination than we do. That’s what comes to mind when I have to do talk about my career. I started as an administrative magistrate at the Conseil d’Etat. The four very happy years I spent there convinced me I had a taste for law and decision-making. After that, I was a legal adviser to Laurent Fabius when he was President of the National Assembly and then Minister of Finance. I then joined the legal department of the Ministry of Finance as an under-director of public, European and international law.

In 2005, I joined Gaz de France as legal director just before the company merged with Suez. This was one of my most memorable experiences. I continued to work for the new GDF Suez (Engie) group as general counsel, heading up a large, international and talented community of 400 lawyers. It was in 2013 that my career took an unexpected turn. I wanted to take on some operational responsibilities, and I had an opportunity to be named CEO of GRDF, the largest gas distribution network in Europe (200,000 km) with a wonderful corporate culture but also a big strategic challenge: how to build a future for an infrastructure that transports a form of energy destined to decline. At the time, the Paris Agreement was taking shape, and I was very involved in that project. My team and I decided to transform the company by turning it into a key player in energy transition. My successors have since continued to pursue these goals, and I look back on that experience with a great deal of satisfaction.

In my next assignment, as a member of Engie’s executive committee, I was in charge of the entire gas infrastructure. In 2017, I wanted to move into the field of investment while remaining focused on the environmental impact. So it was rather naturally that I joined Meridiam, a pioneer fund in sustainable infrastructure. I started out in charge of asset management. I needed to build a portfolio management strategy and put knowledge sharing to work with a focus on creating both financial and non-financial value. The group was experiencing rapid growth all this time, and it needed an impact-based mission to give it coherence and to prepare it for this growth. So we transformed Meridiam into one of the first sociétés à mission, a French legal status under which companies publicly commit to certain social and environmental goals. Meridiam is now a “B Corp” and has implemented a management system that measures impact at each investment and operational stage. This is all monitored by the Mission Committee that I chaired.

When Louis Godron presented Argos’s new strategy to me, I saw an opportunity to take the experience I had gained in management at Engie and in sustainable finance at Meridiam and apply it to the SME universe, which has always attracted me. This is how I joined Argos and its ambitious plans to turn companies into champions of ecological transition in their sector and to help them contribute to the great challenge of our generation: combating climate change.