President of the Rules for Growth institute, Georges Ugeux is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Galileo Global Advisors (an investment bank specializing in cross-border advice and transactions, particularly to and from emerging countries).
He is an Associate Professor at the Columbia University School of Law, where he convenes a seminar on International Banking and Finance. He is also a visiting professor at the University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne.
He sits on the Board of Directors of AXA Tian Ping, an insurance company based in Shanghai, and Avant, an information technology company based and listed in Tokyo.
A Doctor of Law and a graduate in economics from the Catholic University of Louvain, Georges has focused his career on the global dimension of companies, capital markets and governments.
Georges Ugeux began his career at Société Générale de Banque (now BNP Paribas Fortis), where he became in 1982 Director of the Finance Department, which covered the activities of investment banking, wealth management and the bank’s network securities activities. In 1985, he joined Morgan Stanley in London as Managing Director, first in charge of corporate finance, then the mergers and acquisitions department. He left this position to become Chief Financial Officer of Société Générale de Belgique, the main Belgian conglomerate that had just been taken over by the Suez group.
In 1992, he became President and Managing Director of Kidder, Peabody International, owned by General Electric, for which he became a member of the European Corporate Executive Council. Following the dismantling of Kidder Peabody, he is appointed President of the European Investment Fund, a two billion euros public-private partnership, in charge of guaranteeing the financing of SMEs and cross-border infrastructure projects in the European Union. He will also go on to initiate the private equity activity of the EIF at the Lisbon General Assembly in 1996.
For seven years, Georges Ugeux created and led of the New York Stock Exchange international group, to which he brought more than 300 foreign companies, with a total market capitalisation of $ 2.7 billion.
He is a member of the investment committee of various entities, such as the Sœurs de Notre Dame d’Afrique and the Belgian American Education Foundation, an adviser of the Emerging Markets Institute of Cornell University and a member of the board of Polyfinances, the financial arm of the Polytechnic University of Montreal. He is chairman of the American Friends of the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel.
He is frequently solicited as a lecturer on finance, banking, financial regulation and globalization. He has taught at the Catholic University of Leuven and at the College of Europe in Bruges. He is an advisor to APCO worldwide in Washington and Oxford Analytica in the United Kingdom.