Five disciplines for changing how a bank employs people

A branch closure in France is a consultation, a negotiation and a series of individual decisions, and I treat all three as part of the plan rather than its aftermath. Before the CSE receives a document, I want a travel-time map for every affected employee, not a table of distances, and a list of the roles each person could realistically move into. Those records shape the mobility agreement we negotiate with the representative unions: allowances, retraining, protected working patterns for part-time staff and the order in which branches close. I also separate the decision to close from its timetable. A board can approve the network the bank needs while giving the people affected enough time to choose. Faster programmes look cheaper on paper, but they often pay the difference in departures, sickness absence and lost customer relationships.

The EU capital requirements framework sets the main constraints on bank pay: identifying staff whose activities can materially affect risk, limiting variable pay relative to fixed pay, deferring part of it and making it subject to malus and clawback. In a cooperative bank whose member-shareholders expect restraint, those rules are a floor rather than the whole policy. I prepare the annual identification exercise with risk and compliance colleagues, propose the policy to the remuneration committee and explain to managers what it means for them in euros. We extended deferral beyond the population the rules require, because I wanted managers in advisory businesses to share the risk of the sales they encourage. The policy is credible only if malus is used when the facts justify it, and if its conditions were explained before anyone needed them.

The EU pay-transparency directive asks employers to compare pay for work of equal value, using criteria such as skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions, and to justify or correct the gaps they find. France already required companies to publish a professional-equality index, but that index never told our managers why two advisers in the same branch were paid differently. We rebuilt our job architecture into 46 categories of comparable work, agreed the evaluation method with the unions and tested every individual salary against it. We now publish pay ranges in job advertisements and no longer allow starting salaries to be negotiated outside them. That discipline matters most where the market pulls hardest, which for us means German-speaking advisers whom employers across the Luxembourg border can afford to pay more.

Advice in a retail bank is regulated through the people who give it. Certain investment advisers need professional certification, staff who distribute insurance-based products must keep their training current, and holders of key functions face suitability assessment. I own the register that shows those requirements are met, and I treat it as conduct evidence rather than administration. The harder work lies in incentives. A scorecard tells advisers what the bank values more plainly than any code of conduct, so I review every variable-pay scheme with compliance before launch and ask what behaviour it would reward in a bad month. Since our cross-border suitability failure, file quality carries forty per cent of a desk manager's variable pay, and suitability documents must be available in the customer's own language.

Our credit and payments operations employ about 290 people, many of whom have done similar work for twenty years. Document-reading software is now changing what those jobs contain. The EU's AI rules treat systems used in recruitment, promotion or performance decisions as high-risk, and French law requires the CSE to be consulted before new technology is introduced. I apply a simpler test as well: no employee should discover from a workload report that their job has changed. We plan retraining before a tool goes live, keep system productivity data out of individual appraisals and decide in advance which vacancies will not be filled. Language belongs in the same planning. Where a role needs German or Luxembourgish, we test the skill, pay for it and write the procedures in it.