Coface Taps Veterans for Partnership Push in Strategic Overhaul

PARIS, FRANCE – May 04, 2026 – Global trade credit insurer Coface has announced a significant leadership shuffle, appointing two of its long-serving executives to new roles designed to accelerate its strategic focus on partnerships. The move places veteran Katarzyna Kompowska in the newly created position of CEO of Strategic Partnerships, while Christian Stoffel steps up to succeed her as Managing Director for the crucial Northern Europe region.

Effective May 1, 2026, these appointments are not a routine reshuffle but a clear and deliberate execution of the company’s ‘Power the Core’ strategic plan. By creating a C-suite role dedicated entirely to partnerships and promoting from within, Coface is signaling its intent to build a more interconnected ecosystem for trade risk management, moving aggressively to adapt to a rapidly digitizing and increasingly volatile global market.

Kompowska will now join the Group Management Committee, reporting directly to Coface CEO Xavier Durand. Her mandate is to accelerate the development of high-potential partnerships across all of the Group’s business lines. Stoffel, who also reports to Durand, joins the Executive Committee, ensuring strategic continuity in a key European market.

The 'Power the Core' Blueprint

The executive changes are a direct reflection of Coface’s 2024-2027 strategic plan, ‘Power the Core’. This plan is the company’s roadmap for navigating an economic environment characterized by normalizing credit risk after years of historically low claims. It aims to deepen the company's core trade credit insurance (TCI) franchise while aggressively pursuing growth in adjacent, high-margin business lines.

The strategy rests on several key pillars. First is a major investment in data and technology, integrating artificial intelligence and advanced data science to enhance risk scoring and underwriting capabilities. The goal is to build a more predictive and responsive technology infrastructure.

Second, the plan seeks to stimulate profitable growth in its core TCI business by focusing on customer-centricity and simplifying the experience, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This comes as client retention remains robust, reported at 92.9% for the full-year 2025.

Critically, ‘Power the Core’ calls for profitable, double-digit growth in its business information services. The company's 2025 results already showed strong momentum in this area, with information services growing 16.2% at constant FX. This strategic priority is further evidenced by recent acquisitions, including Cedar Rose Group in the Middle East and Novertur International SA in Switzerland. Partnerships are the essential glue intended to bind these strategic pillars together, creating what Coface envisions as a “credit risk management ecosystem of reference.”

Veteran Leadership for a New Era

Coface is entrusting the execution of this ambitious plan to seasoned insiders. Katarzyna Kompowska is a Coface stalwart, having joined the company in 1992. With over three decades of experience, she was instrumental in establishing the firm's operations in Poland, building it into a market leader. Her leadership credentials were further solidified during her tenure as CEO for the Central and Eastern Europe region, covering 14 countries, and more recently as CEO of the Northern Europe Region since 2017. Her extensive regional and operational experience, combined with her long-standing position on the Group Executive Committee, provides her with the deep institutional knowledge required to forge complex, group-wide strategic alliances.

Her successor, Christian Stoffel, represents a commitment to strategic continuity and performance-driven leadership. Since joining Coface in 2019, initially as Chairman of its German factoring entity, Stoffel has proven his commercial acumen. As Sales Director for Northern Europe since April 2022, he was credited with the successful turnaround of the mid-market business in the region. His nearly 30 years of experience in financial services, including senior roles at TARGO Commercial Finance and GE Capital, give him a strong foundation in both strategic vision and operational execution, making him a natural choice to maintain momentum in Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia.

Building a Trade Risk Ecosystem

Kompowska’s new role is a direct response to a broader industry trend where financial service providers are moving beyond standalone products to build integrated ecosystems. In the world of trade credit, this means forging partnerships with fintechs, e-commerce platforms, banks, and logistics providers to embed risk management solutions directly into the flow of commerce.

This ecosystem approach allows insurers to offer more holistic solutions. For instance, collaborations with B2B digital payment platforms can integrate real-time credit checks and insurance, enabling sellers to offer deferred payment terms with greater security. Partnerships with banks can bundle trade finance with credit insurance, providing a one-stop-shop for SMEs looking to expand internationally. Coface has already explored such avenues, with past and present collaborations with firms like Bits Technology for credit reporting and financial institutions for product distribution.

The strategic imperative is clear: to create more value and stickier client relationships by becoming an indispensable part of the B2B trade lifecycle. This move is particularly vital for serving the SME segment, which often lacks the resources for sophisticated in-house risk management but faces significant exposure to payment defaults.

Navigating a Turbulent Economic Climate

This strategic pivot is set against a challenging macroeconomic backdrop. While Coface reported stable turnover of approximately €1.84 billion in 2025, its net income declined by 15% as the credit cycle continued to normalize. The company's net combined ratio—a key measure of profitability in insurance—rose to 73.1%, reflecting a higher loss ratio as business insolvencies trended upwards from post-pandemic lows.

Coface’s own economic outlook for 2026 anticipates this trend will continue, with a projected global increase in insolvencies of 3% to 4%, following a significant rise in 2025. With global growth expected to remain sluggish and fragile, businesses in exposed sectors like construction and chemicals face compressed margins and heightened risk. In this environment, the demand for sophisticated risk management tools is set to increase.

By strengthening its focus on partnerships and value-added services like business information, Coface is positioning itself not just to weather this economic turbulence but to capitalize on it. The appointments of Kompowska and Stoffel are a calculated move to ensure that experienced hands are on the wheel, steering the company toward new avenues of growth and reinforcing its central role in facilitating global trade.