Novo Nordisk said on Nov. 4 that Chief Financial Officer Karsten Munk Knudsen will leave at year-end and that Luigi La Corte, currently CFO of Galderma, will succeed him, according to Reuters and CNBC. The company’s official announcement names La Corte as executive vice president and CFO, succeeding Munk Knudsen.
Munk Knudsen is a 27-year Novo veteran and has served as CFO since 2018, according to Morningstar’s Dow Jones report. He will remain with the company through the end of December. That gives the outgoing finance chief a defined departure window and gives the organization time to prepare for a handoff at the top of a major corporate function. Novo did not describe a separate interim CFO arrangement.
La Corte arrives from Galderma, the Swiss dermatology group where he currently leads finance. Before that, he served as CFO of Italian pharmaceutical company Recordati from 2019 to 2025, the company announcement says. He will relocate to Denmark to take the Novo role. The move is an external appointment, while Munk Knudsen’s departure closes a long internal tenure; the company has identified both sides of the succession rather than announcing a vacancy and beginning a search.
The transition was announced alongside Novo’s third-quarter results on Nov. 4. The leadership facts are clear, but the release does not give La Corte a specific first day or set out a new finance agenda for him. It says he will take up the CFO role after joining and relocating to Denmark. Until then, Munk Knudsen remains in post through December, so the company has named the successor and the handoff period without suggesting that responsibilities change immediately. Both executives are described at executive vice president level, and the release gives the current CFO’s final month without a separate overlap date.
For readers following finance leadership, Encafeinados recently covered CN’s appointment of Jamie Lockwood as CFO, another succession in which the departing finance chief’s exit and the successor’s role were both made public. Novo’s timeline is different: the current CFO has a year-end departure date, while the announcement does not specify the incoming CFO’s exact start date. That distinction is worth keeping intact rather than treating the two dates as interchangeable.
