Stephan Leithner

We have turned Deutsche Börse into a broadly positioned infrastructure provider.

— Stephan Leithner

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Overview

Stephan Leithner
Born	(1966-05-15) 15 May 1966 Innsbruck, Austria
Citizenship	Austria
Education	Economics; finance
Alma mater	University of St. Gallen
Occupation(s)	Banker and business executive
Employer	Deutsche Börse AG
Known for	Chief executive officer of Deutsche Börse AG
Title	Chief executive officer
Term	2025–present
Predecessor	Theodor Weimer
Board member of	Clearstream; BVV; Digital Asset Holdings LLC
Spouse	Married
Children	3

🏦 Stephan Leithner (born 15 May 1966) is an Austrian banker and business executive who serves as chief executive officer (CEO) of Deutsche Börse AG, the operator of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. He joined the group's executive board in 2018 and was named deputy CEO in March 2024, becoming co-chief executive alongside Theodor Weimer on 1 October 2024 before succeeding him as sole CEO on 1 January 2025.

🌍 Global career. Over more than three decades, Leithner has worked at the intersection of investment banking, market infrastructure and corporate governance, holding senior positions at McKinsey & Company, Deutsche Bank AG, private equity firm EQT and finally Deutsche Börse. Profiles in the German financial press have described him as a "natural climber" and an "introverted strategist", highlighting a methodical, team-oriented leadership style rather than a flamboyant deal-maker persona.

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Early life and education

🏔️ Tyrolean upbringing. Leithner was born in Innsbruck and grew up in Pertisau, a village on the shores of Lake Achensee in the Austrian Tyrol, where his family operated a resort combining a hotel, golf course, ski school and sporting-goods shop that was later taken over by his brother. His mother came from a German industrialist family, giving him early exposure to entrepreneurial and industrial environments in both Austria and Germany.

🎓 Academic training. From 1985 to 1989, Leithner studied economics at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, graduating with a lic. oec. degree before completing a doctorate in finance there in 1992 with a dissertation on valuing and managing the risks of interest-rate derivatives. During his doctoral work he was influenced by Josef Ackermann, a St. Gallen alumnus who later became chief executive of Deutsche Bank, an early contact that helped shape his interest in global capital markets.

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Career

💼 Consulting years. After a short spell as a research assistant at St. Gallen's Institute of Banking and Finance, Leithner joined McKinsey & Company in 1992, marking his first major move from academia into business practice. Working from offices in Frankfurt, New York and Munich, he advised financial-sector clients and was promoted to partner in 1997 at the age of 31.

📈 Deutsche Bank entry. In 2000 Leithner left consulting to join Deutsche Bank, where he was tasked with strengthening the bank's capital-markets and mergers-and-acquisitions advisory franchise, which at the time lagged leading global competitors. Under his leadership the division rose into a top position in European corporate finance league tables, and by 2010 he had been appointed global head of corporate finance, overseeing worldwide M&A and equity and debt issuance activities.

🏛️ Board responsibilities. In 2012, during a broader management reshuffle following Josef Ackermann's departure as CEO, Leithner joined Deutsche Bank's management board, a move commentators saw as the elevation of a "natural climber". Instead of leading the investment bank, he was given responsibility for human resources, legal and regulatory affairs and the role of regional CEO for Europe excluding Germany, placing him at the centre of the bank's efforts to address governance, culture and compliance concerns after the global financial crisis.

🔄 Exit to private equity. Leithner's tenure on Deutsche Bank's board coincided with some of the institution's most difficult years, including internal and regulatory investigations into misconduct in areas such as benchmark interest-rate submissions. In October 2015, amid a major strategic overhaul under new CEO John Cryan, Deutsche Bank announced that Leithner would leave the management board at his own request to pursue an opportunity in private equity, and he subsequently joined EQT Partners in Munich as a partner, where his responsibilities included evaluating investments and serving on boards such as Scandic Hotels Group.

🔗 Joining Deutsche Börse. In 2018 Leithner returned to the exchange and market-infrastructure sphere when he joined the executive board of Deutsche Börse AG, the company operating the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, at the invitation of CEO Theodor Weimer. On the board he assumed responsibility for pre-trading and post-trading businesses, including market data and index services as well as clearing, settlement and custody operations, effectively overseeing much of the group's financial market infrastructure.

🧠 Investment Management Solutions. At Deutsche Börse, Leithner emerged as a principal architect of a strategy to expand the group beyond traditional exchange trading into a diversified provider of data, analytics and investment-management technology. He helped drive acquisitions such as a majority stake in governance and ESG data provider Institutional Shareholder Services and the €3.9 billion takeover of Danish investment-management software firm SimCorp in 2023, transactions that underpinned the creation of an Investment Management Solutions segment combining indices, ESG analytics, fund services and portfolio software.

🎯 CEO succession. Under the joint stewardship of Weimer and Leithner, Deutsche Börse's net revenues and EBITDA grew at double-digit annual rates, and the company repositioned itself as a broadly based market-infrastructure group with rising market capitalisation. In March 2024 the supervisory board named Leithner deputy CEO, and on 1 October 2024 he became co-chief executive during a three-month transition before taking over as sole CEO at the start of 2025, making him the first internally promoted leader of Deutsche Börse in its modern history.

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Compensation and wealth

💶 Executive pay. As a member of Deutsche Börse's executive board, Leithner received total remuneration of around €4.6 million for 2023, including fixed salary, short-term bonus and long-term incentive components, an increase of almost one fifth compared with the previous year. With his promotion to chief executive, his package is expected to rise towards the level of his predecessor Theodor Weimer, whose pay, including an exceptional stock-based component, amounted to about €11.5 million for 2022.

💹 Shareholdings and roles. Deutsche Börse's share-ownership guidelines require executive board members to build and maintain significant personal holdings in the company, and by the end of 2023 Leithner held shares worth approximately €2.6 million, comfortably above the minimum threshold. In addition to his executive duties, he chairs or sits on the supervisory boards of several Deutsche Börse subsidiaries, including Clearstream entities in Luxembourg and Germany, and serves as a director of blockchain-technology firm Digital Asset Holdings as well as a supervisory board member of the pension fund BVV, positions that underline his influence across European financial-market infrastructure.

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Personal life

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family and roots. Leithner is married and reported to have three children, though he keeps details of his family life largely out of the public eye. He has remained strongly connected to his Tyrolean origins: having grown up in a ski and hiking region, he is known to return to the mountains when possible and has cited the values of hard work, modesty and a closeness to nature from his upbringing in Pertisau as enduring personal anchors.

🎨 Culture and networks. Beyond finance, Leithner is engaged in cultural and business networks in Germany, serving on the board of trustees of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and acting as treasurer of the Baden-Badener Unternehmer-Gespräche, an exclusive forum for corporate leaders. Colleagues and profiles describe him as a soft-spoken, analytical manager who prefers to work in teams rather than seek the limelight, and who is more likely to spend his spare time with family, in the mountains or reading economic reports than attending high-profile social events.

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Controversies and challenges

⚖️ LIBOR oversight criticism. Although there have been no allegations that Leithner personally participated in misconduct, his period on Deutsche Bank's management board overlapped with investigations into the manipulation of interbank offered rates, including LIBOR. A 2015 report by Germany's financial regulator BaFin, as reported by Reuters, criticised elements of the bank's internal controls and stated that several board members, including those responsible for legal and compliance functions, needed to answer for how the bank analysed and responded to the scandal. Deutsche Bank disputed parts of the report, and no regulatory sanctions against Leithner individually were made public, but he has later described the bank's post-crisis turmoil as one of the most formative and sobering experiences of his career.

🧪 Regulatory and strategic tests. At Deutsche Börse, Leithner has so far avoided personal scandal, but his leadership faces ongoing regulatory and strategic challenges. In early 2025 the European Commission opened antitrust proceedings examining whether Deutsche Börse and Nasdaq may have infringed competition rules in certain index and data businesses, an inquiry that touches areas of the group previously overseen by Leithner and that he has pledged to address in full cooperation with regulators. Shareholders and analysts have also questioned the execution risks and purchase price of major acquisitions such as SimCorp, concerns that Leithner has sought to address by making integration milestones and synergy delivery central elements of the group's strategic plan and management incentives.

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Views and public positions

🇪🇺 European capital markets. A recurring theme in Leithner's public comments is the relative weakness of continental Europe's capital markets compared with those of the United States. He has pointed out that only a small fraction of global initial public offerings take place in the European Union and argues that the key bottleneck is a shortage of domestic institutional investors willing to provide long-term equity capital, rather than a lack of innovative companies. Drawing on examples such as Sweden's large pension funds, he has advocated deeper European capital-markets integration and initiatives, including programmes in which insurers commit billions of euros to venture capital and growth financing, to strengthen Germany's and Europe's ability to fund new enterprises.

🌱 ESG and unfinished business. Leithner has supported Deutsche Börse's expansion into environmental, social and governance (ESG) products, backing new sustainability-oriented indices and the acquisition of ESG data providers as a way to channel capital towards the transition to a lower-carbon economy while preserving investor choice. At the same time, he has spoken of a sense of "unfinished business" after his abrupt departure from Deutsche Bank, framing his current role as an opportunity to contribute to the long-term development of Europe's financial centre and to "shape the markets of the future" through cautious innovation in areas such as digital assets and market infrastructure.

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