Deutsche Börse has made internal arrangements for the successor to its CEO, Theodor Weimer, who is leaving at the end of the year. As the company announced in the late afternoon of March 8th via an ad hoc announcement, Stephan Leithner will take over the management of the stock exchange from next year. This has been agreed upon by the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Börse.

However, the 57-year-old will take office on 1 October and will lead Deutsche Börse together with Weimer until the end of the year. With Leithner's promotion, Deutsche Börse is filling the CEO position from within its own ranks for the first time. All previous CEOs came from outside. Weimer joined the company in 2018 from HypoVereinsbank, which belongs to Italian Unicredit.

Leithner can also look back on a long banking past. He worked for Deutsche Bank from 2000 to 2015, where he was initially responsible for building up the capital markets and M&A business and finally joined the Executive Board in 2012. Before Leithner joined Deutsche Börse in 2018, he also worked for the Swedish private equity investor EQT for two years.

At Deutsche Börse, Leithner was previously responsible for pre- and post-trading. However, his current area of responsibility also includes the post-trading business with the Clearstream Group as well as the strategically important Investment Management Solutions segment, where Deutsche Börse made the largest acquisition in the company's history last year with Simcorp. The previous takeovers of Axioma, Kneip, UBS Fondscenter and FundsDLT also fell under Leithner's remit.

While Weimer's aim when he took office was to „lead the stock exchange out of a period of deep uncertainty“, as Chairman of the Supervisory Board Martin Jetter describes it, Leithner is likely to be judged above all on whether and how the growth plans for Investment Management Solutions materialise. The segment is part of the „Horizon 2026“ strategy and is aimed at asset managers.