Eleonore Galouzeau de Villepin is the Managing Director at Oberon Securities, LLC. She has over 25 years of professional experience in investment banking in the United States and in treasury and funding departments of global industrial companies in Europe. She specializes in non-fossil fuel energy, infrastructure, metals and mining, waste-to-energy, and materials recycling sectors. Her expertise lies in structuring debt and equity transactions to finance corporations, joint ventures, and industrial projects aligned with the energy transition, industry decarbonization, and circular economy, including green, grey and white hydrogen projects, waste-to-energy and renewable energies applicable for industrial-scale projects, decarbonization of steel, aluminum, cement and mining industries, biofuels, electromobility/ EV battery, and materials recycling. She has worked with brands such as Qenta Inc., Societe Generale, JPMorgan Chase & Co., CNIM, and more. She was part of the Duke CFO Program 2024-25 cohort and has shared her experience of the program.
Why did you choose to do this program?
A big reason was to diversify my network, definitely. The networking here in the US. Because I’ve been traveling all around the world, and I came back to the US four years ago and I really wanted to deepen my networks here. I believe that coming back through an executive program was the relevant choice.
Why did you choose Duke Executive Education?
I really wanted to experience a university that has a very high academic standard. Duke was the perfect mix for me because I was looking for the best American credentials you can have and also the fact that it’s a mix of the pure American experience with international exposure. Additionally the faculty comes from all around the world. So, Duke for me was a natural choice.
How was your overall learning experience?
What I really liked about this program was the originality of the subjects, because we have been dealing with, for example, the implication of big data and the integration of AI within the finance sector, we have also been dealing with cryptocurrencies. So, those topics are quite new for CFOs and although we deal with that on a daily basis, they are very new. I think that’s really something that attracted me. There are other good courses about the basics in finance, but the fact is that we are dealing with new topics where everybody is starting from scratch. I think that this program is very original, especially by bringing faculty that has a very interesting way of thinking about those new problems. We would have really interactive dialogues on those new subjects. So, I really appreciated this sort of new approach about the subject matter.
How was your experience with the Duke faculty?
Well first of all, I was really impressed by the quality of the faculty and the diversity of knowledge because we didn’t have experts purely in the financial world. We had people that have different types of expertise. So I think it was very interesting to see the diversity within the faculty leading this program.
How did the global peer group impact your learning experience?
It was very interesting to interact with people coming from the corporate world, where some were from the financial advisory world, and some were startupers who had to basically learn from scratch by running their business. So again, I think it was interesting to see the different angles of each of us. We were not only dealing with CFOs in large corporations, but also dealing with financial professionals who had to learn by facing different situations.