Robert Ophèle is the second Deputy Governor of the Banque de France. He is 55 years old and a graduate of the ESSEC Business School, with a specialisation in economics, finance and accounting. He joined the Banque de France in 1981, where he has spent most of his career. After three years in banking supervision, he worked as an Economist in the Monetary Studies and Statistics Directorate. There, between 1985 and 1989, he focused on the impact of financial market developments on money and credit aggregates.
Following a secondment to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York between 1990 and 1991, he returned to the head offices of the Banque de France as Head of the Budget Division before taking up the post of Director of the Management Control and Budget Directorate, which he exercised until 2006. He was then appointed Deputy Director General Economics and International Relations from July 2006 to May 2009, and was promoted to Director General Operations in June 2009. In this position, he was responsible for overseeing market operations (front, middle, and back offices) relating to monetary policy implementation, foreign exchange reserve management, proprietary trading in euro and transactions carried out on behalf of foreign central banks.
His duties also included the oversight of French payment systems and market infrastructures, developing and managing systems on behalf of the Eurosystem, and financial stability issues, both at the national and international level, with particular focus on macroprudential questions in cooperation with the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and the Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS). As Director General Operations and member of the Executive Committee of the Bank, he actively participated in the work of many national (Co-chairman of the National SEPA Committee, Chairman of the Paris Robustesse group, etc.) and international bodies.
