ClickandBuy appointed a new CEO, Norbert Stangl fails

According to Handelsblatt, the leading German commercial economy newspaper, ClickandBuy announced about a new CEO appointment. The seat will be occupied by Charles Fränkl (50) who previously served as CEO at AOL Germany. The management replacement has put an end (at least temporally) to a strange and severe struggle between the company’s founder Norbert Stangl and several investors from Frankfurt’s 3i, a leading global venture capital fund, which could have resulted in vanishing of the company in 2007.

A transitional CEO Jan Kantowsky of Alix Partners, who was certainly an interim person, left the company as long as he has already fulfilled the task assigned. At the moment Ex-CEO Stangl remains in Swiss exile while ClickandBuy can further focus on competing with its main rival PayPal. For company founder Stangl, it is ultimately the sealing of a de facto defeat, though he still remains president of the Board of the Swiss holding company Firstgate and reserves so far-reaching influence. Whatever his goal was he failed to realize it. He wanted to get rid of “rebels” from the financial investor 3i and return again to Cologne to executive position.

Fränkls most urgent task will now be to make C&B stronger in the on-line payment sector along with launching physical goods, so that the classic online commerce and payment services on the booming market of mobile-payment systems could expand. The mobile market is not new for Fränkl. Before he came to AOL, he worked as CEO at Vodafone Information Systems being responsible for the worldwide technical development of the mobile operator; at E-Plus he led the business customers department.