Benoît Chervalier, founder of BCH INVEST GROUP.
Profile
Investment banker, lecturer in finance and geopolitics at ESSEC Business School, and active in French and European business-federation roles.
Benoît lived abroad for ten years — Germany, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Tunisia — and has travelled to more than 80 countries, 40 of them in Africa, a continent to which he is bound by kinship and commitment.
He brings 25 years of experience in negotiations and transactions with emerging markets, and with the African continent in particular.
25 years
of experience
80
countries visited
40
in Africa
15 years
of teaching
The entrepreneur
He founded the BCH INVEST group, an investment company active in Europe and Africa, together with its subsidiary one2five advisory in 2016 — a boutique specialising in corporate and sovereign financial advisory in Africa, debt restructuring, mergers and acquisitions and project finance.
The investment banker
He has held senior roles with major banking (Rothschild & Co) and industrial (Airbus) groups on the Africa region, following an initial decade in the public sector.
He headed the department responsible for the concessional window of the African Development Bank and chaired the Bank Group’s Finance Committee. Before that he served at the Treasury Directorate General in France and at the Federal Ministry of Finance in Germany, with responsibility for major international summits, export finance, foreign investment and the multilateral development banks.
Business-federation roles
Vice-President of the Africa Committee of MEDEF International, in charge of European affairs, and Chair of the Africa network of the European business federation BusinessEurope.
The lecturer
He has taught for more than fifteen years — at Sciences Po Paris, and today at ESSEC — the finance of African economies and of companies, as well as geopolitics. In 2024 he created the first Africa chair on the continent, “Business and Industry in Africa”, based on the Rabat campus and devoted to industrialisation and the local processing of raw materials. He also teaches at IRIS and at FERDI in Clermont-Ferrand, and occasionally at leading international schools and universities.
The author
Combining strong technical command with a taste for teaching, debate and ideas, he publishes op-eds, working papers and books. His latest book, Ce qu’attend l’Afrique — Ressources locales, tensions mondiales, is published by éditions de l’Aube and is now available in English.
Education
- Harvard Kennedy School of Government (LMD)
- Master (MSc), Sciences Po Bordeaux and Paris
- Alumnus of the 59th national session “Armament and Defence Economics” at IHEDN