Daniel Bouton turned 59 only a couple of weeks ago. Normally, he could have claimed several more years to continue running Société Générale. But circumstances have hardly been normal in the past 12 months for the chairman and architect of the French bank’s expansion to become one of Europe’s financial powerhouses, and he will be moving out next week.

If the subprime crisis were not bad enough for a bank that had built a reputation as a leader in equity derivatives, the rogue trading scandal that hit SocGen last year seemed to put the writing on the wall for an otherwise impressive career as a banker.