Ariane de Rothschild

Ariane de Rothschild (née Langner; 14 November 1965) is a Salvadorean-French banker, CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Group since March 2023. She is the first woman and the first person without Rothschild lineage 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, the youngest being Juliana B who recently turned 30.

In 2022, the net worth of the Benjamin de Rothschild family was estimated at 5 billion euros by French weekly business magazine Challenges.

Family
Ariane Langner was born in San Salvador, El Salvador. Her father was a senior executive at the international pharmaceutical company Hoechst. Until the age of eighteen, Ariane Langner 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 four daughters. Her husband Benjamin de Rothschild died on 15 January 2021 of a heart attack. Ariane de Rothschild is not Jewish and did not convert to Judaism.

Education
Ariane Langner attended the French lycée in Zaire, 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 Langner 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 La Compagnie Financière Edmond de Rothschild (LCF) by taking on the management of the group's lifestyle assets (wineries, farms, hotels, restaurants). In 2005, she restructured the group's philanthropic activities with the intent to develop a sustainable "return on engagement" philanthropic model, which led to the creation of the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations, a structure active in five different fields : Art and culture, health and research, philanthropy, cultural dialogue and social entrepreneurship.

In 2006, she joined the supervisory board of LCF Edmond de Rothschild. In 2008, she was appointed board member of the group, and vice-president in 2009. She focused her agenda on environmental and social impact investments, and on restructuring the company's scattered assets and subsidiaries. In 2010, LCF 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 report for the first time.

On 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 and breaking 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 new label Edmond de Rothschild Heritage. She pulled the Edmond de Rothschild Group out of Asia and, the following year, in 2017, she implemented the Avaloq banking technology. 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. The French business was folded into the Swiss company to simplify the structure of the group. In January 2021, her husband Benjamin de Rothschild died, which gave her majority control over the Edmond de Rothschild Group via her four daughters’ votes. In March 2023, she took over as CEO of the group.

Other activities
From 2003 to 2011, the Ariane de Rothschild Art Prize awarded contemporary art initiatives. The Ariane de Rothschild Women's Doctoral Program in Israel was launched in 2009 to provide 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.

In 2012, she talked with Warren Buffett about philanthropy in the first scene of the documentary The Billionaires' Pledge.

In 2018, she led the acquisition of the fragrance company Parfums Caron and managed the revival of the brand, focusing its distribution on Middle Eastern countries. After the death of husband Benjamin de Rothschild in 2021, she took over the management of the sailing stable Gitana Team. In 2021, she released the first vintage of the rosé wine L'Amistà (Château Roubine, Côtes de Provence) she co-developed.

In 2023, a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that de Rothschild had more than a dozen meetings with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The bank initially denied that she had met with him, but later admitted that Rothschild "met with Epstein as part of her normal duties at the bank between 2013 and 2019". The journal also reported that she helped him find assistants.

Distinctions

 * 2022: Swiss Finance's Women To Watch