Daniel Julien and the ten lines that went around the world

Daniel Julien’s childhood hero was Marco Polo. It is an unusual choice for someone whose business would depend on persuading people to stay at a desk and answer the telephone. Yet it explains rather a lot. Once he had established his company in France, Julien wanted to go abroad. He did not wait for French customers to take him with them. He found a manager and set about finding customers elsewhere. A telephone line, it turned out, could be a remarkably good excuse to travel.

In 1978, the equipment amounted to ten lines in a Paris office. Julien was 25. Forty-eight years later, in March 2026, he handed executive leadership of TP, the business long known as Teleperformance, to Jorge Amar. Between those dates lies a career spent arranging something that sounds almost too ordinary to become an industry: making sure a business has someone available when its customer wants a response.

There is a curious imbalance in that work. A customer remembers the airline, bank or phone company whose name appears on the bill. The organization answering the question may remain entirely out of view. Julien built his career in that gap between a familiar brand and an unfamiliar voice. His company became enormous while its founder remained considerably less recognizable than the businesses it served.

Ten lines, then a map

Julien was born in Paris on December 23, 1952, and studied economics at Paris X, now Paris Nanterre University. His early jobs were in food: sales management at Jacquet and product management at Boursin. Before the international contact centers came bread and cheese. As business apprenticeships go, it at least had the advantage of being easy to explain over dinner.

The original Teleperformance was a telemarketing operation. Its beginnings belonged to a world of fixed lines, long before a customer could complain simultaneously through a phone, a website and a social account. The business eventually followed the customer across those channels, but the starting proposition was straightforward enough: help companies communicate and sell by telephone.

The geographic progress came in stages. France first, with a leading domestic position by 1985. Belgium and Italy followed in 1986. Spain, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom joined the European footprint in 1988. An American contact center opened in 1993; the company reached a leading European position in 1995. Mexico followed in 2002, Argentina and Brazil in 2004. The dates describe expansion; they also show how long Julien kept at it.

His own life crossed the Atlantic too. Julien became French-American and moved from Paris to Miami Beach, the city listed on his public professional profile. The internationalism was personal as well as commercial. He has spoken enthusiastically about colleagues from different countries working together. His operating world required a French founder to be comfortable with a company that could no longer sensibly be understood as simply French.

The business of being interrupted

Teleperformance’s development followed changes in what customers expected companies to do. Customer service became a business in its own right. Mobile operators needed support operations. Online commerce multiplied the opportunities for an order, an account or a delivery to go astray. Each new convenience brought another possible question. Somewhere, someone had to take it.

By June 2020, Teleperformance had entered France’s CAC 40 index. The journey from a small telemarketing operation to a place among the index’s companies took decades. Along the way, the work broadened into technical support, interpreting, digital services and back-office operations. A phone conversation remained one part of a much larger system.

Acquisitions helped change what that system could do. In 2016, Teleperformance agreed to acquire LanguageLine Solutions for $1.52 billion. LanguageLine brought telephone and video interpreting, extending the company’s role in conversations where the participants did not share a language. There is an appealing continuity with the original idea: a business earning its place by helping people understand one another.

In 2023 came Majorel, a €3 billion acquisition that widened the group’s presence, particularly in Europe. The combined companies were presented that December as employing about 500,000 people in 95 countries, using aggregated estimates for 2023. Those figures are a historical snapshot, but they make the distance from the Paris office rather tangible. Ten lines had become an organization in which even a modest change in procedure could affect thousands of working days.

A passport and a procedure manual

For a business with that reach, travel alone is insufficient. Someone has to decide how a good interaction should work, teach it, check it and repeat it. In Julien’s account of management, written processes matter alongside the abilities of individual managers. The adventurer’s luggage, apparently, must include a procedure manual. It is a less romantic accessory than a compass, though rather more useful when a customer has already explained the problem twice.

He has also advocated promotion from within. His argument starts with a practical observation: managers need to understand the work they supervise. A contact center has its own pressures, rhythms and accumulated knowledge. Experience at the beginning of that chain can be valuable further up it. It is a view that places the person taking the call inside the company’s future, rather than treating the desk as a permanent destination.

By February 2024, India occupied a central place in his plans. Julien described it as TP’s top growth market, pointing to a workforce of roughly 90,000 there at the time. The earlier purchase of Intelenet had helped extend the group’s automation and digital capabilities. His attention was on both the number of people the business could employ and the kinds of work they could perform.

The same interview furnished an unexpected answer to a question about relaxation: sailing in turbulent water and horse riding. His explanation was that both activities cleared his mind. There is something pleasingly demanding about these choices. Neither a horse nor rough water offers the reassuring convenience of a quarterly presentation. Both can make their objections known immediately.

The machine arrives at the switchboard

Artificial intelligence gave Julien’s business a particularly pointed question. If a machine could answer the customer, what happened to the company that supplied the person? This was a debate about the product at the center of the business, with consequences for clients, employees and shareholders. It demanded more than a reassuring slogan.

In April 2023, when Teleperformance announced the proposed Majorel purchase, investors were already weighing automation. The company had said that 20 to 30 percent of its then-current volumes could eventually be automated. The acquisition brought scale at a moment when the value of scale itself was being questioned. Buying another large service operation and preparing for fewer routine human interactions were ambitions that had to coexist.

Julien’s response included investment in the technology. In 2019, he opened a customer experience innovation center in Santa Clara, giving clients a place to see proposed solutions at work. By 2024, he was discussing language models, automation and tools for training agents. His business had every reason to examine what software could accomplish. It also had reason to examine the conversation that remained after the easy questions were removed.

His later public writing has emphasized empathy, judgment and trust as qualities people bring to those conversations. That is his argument for the continuing place of human service. It is also a business proposition that must earn its keep: clients will decide which tasks justify a person’s time, and customers will decide whether the help actually feels helpful.

Leaving the chair, keeping a stake

The succession unfolded through several arrangements. Julien was executive chairman from 2013 to 2017, then combined the chairman and CEO roles again. In August 2024, TP separated those offices, with Moulay Hafid Elalamy becoming chairman and Julien continuing as CEO. These changes matter because a founder’s title can obscure the changing distribution of responsibility around him.

On February 26, 2026, TP announced Amar’s appointment, effective March 16. Julien would leave his executive mandate and board seat on March 15. In the announcement, he committed to remaining a long-term shareholder. His subsequent public message described a continuing position as strategic advisor to the chairman and CEO. The operating job had passed to someone else; his association with the company continued.

“My TP journey doesn't end here.”

Daniel Julien, on the 2026 leadership transition

The handover makes a useful stopping point for a story that began with equipment small enough to count without a spreadsheet. For nearly five decades, Julien’s commercial attention returned to the space between a company’s promise and a customer’s experience. Expansion changed the languages, the locations and the technology. The need for an answer kept giving the business work to do.

A small incident captures his willingness to make that point literally. During an interview in Florida, a journalist said he would like to receive a call from the founder of Teleperformance. Julien took the number and dialed. The interviewer’s phone rang. After all the acquisitions, countries and management arrangements, here was an uncomplicated demonstration of the original service. Naturally, the customer still had to pick up.