Chief Human Resources Officer / Europe
Three decisions and what each one cost the bank
- Employees
- 1,860
- Banque Ardevrange, end-2025
- Branches
- 84
- Down from 111 after the 2021–2024 network plan
- Annual personnel costs
- €139m
- 2025; pay policy and negotiation within my remit
Decisions & consequences
01Closing twenty-seven branches over thirty months instead of fifteen
In early 2021 the board asked management to reduce our network from 111 branches to 84. Visits to the smallest rural sites had fallen by more than half in five years, and most customers now reached us through the app or by telephone. The 27 branches proposed for closure employed 238 people, roughly one in eight of our workforce. The finance director's plan closed them within fifteen months and would have produced €7.2 million of annual savings from 2022.
I agreed with the destination but not the timetable. Fifteen months left too little time to consult the CSE properly, negotiate a mobility agreement and train branch advisers for the remote advice centre we were opening in Metz. The chief executive initially supported the faster plan. The board accepted a thirty-month programme in four waves after I showed which roles could be ready at each stage and what the delay would cost: about €4.1 million of deferred savings, plus €3.6 million for training, travel allowances and temporary double staffing.
The unions asked us to protect nine rural branches. We did not agree, but we kept four open two days a week by appointment, at a cost of about €0.9 million a year. Three of the four representative unions signed the mobility agreement in July 2021. It capped commuting time rather than distance, protected existing part-time patterns and gave older employees access to a part-paid end-of-career leave arrangement.
By March 2024, 204 of the 238 colleagues had moved into other branches or our two advice centres, 19 had used the end-of-career arrangement and 15 had left with individually negotiated departures.
Every later reorganisation at the bank now starts with a person-by-person travel and role map. I would change one thing. Eleven of the fifteen departures were part-time women whose childcare could not absorb longer journeys. I should have offered home-based advice-centre work in the first wave, not the third.
Funding pay corrections from the merit budget before the law required them
In 2024 we began preparing for the EU pay-transparency directive. Our pay structure still followed the classification levels of the collective agreement, which grouped very different jobs together and told us little about whether people doing comparable work were paid comparably. With an external job-evaluation specialist and a joint working group drawn from the unions, we placed 1,840 employees into 46 categories of work of equal value.
Most differences could be explained by experience, location allowances and language premiums. One could not. In the customer-adviser categories, women were paid 6.8 per cent less than men on average after those factors were removed. The cause was not a policy but an accumulation of individual choices: negotiated starting salaries, particularly for cross-border hires, and individual increases that favoured the advisers who asked.
The finance director wanted to wait for the French transposition text before committing money. Two unions wanted any correction funded on top of the general increase. I proposed closing the gap over two years at a cost of €1.94 million, funded partly by reducing the 2025 individual merit budget from 1.1 per cent to 0.7 per cent of payroll. The remuneration committee approved the plan in November 2024, after asking for a monthly report on adviser resignations.
The corrections raised the pay of 312 employees, 81 per cent of them women. By March 2026 the unexplained gap in those categories had fallen to 2.3 per cent. We now publish pay ranges in job advertisements and no longer negotiate starting salaries outside them.
The cost was real. Nine highly rated advisers resigned in 2025 and cited pay, against four the previous year, and several managers struggled to explain a smaller merit increase to people who had done nothing wrong. If I did this again, I would show managers the job-evaluation results three months before employees saw the ranges, and I would build a separate, openly explained premium for roles where Luxembourg employers set the competition.
Applying malus to the managers rather than to the advisers they directed
In 2019 we opened a cross-border advice desk in Thionville for customers who live in Moselle and work in Luxembourg or Germany. By 2023 its eleven advisers looked after about €480 million of customer savings. Early in 2024, complaints from German-speaking customers led compliance to review the desk's sales of unit-linked life-insurance contracts. For 140 customers, the suitability record had been completed only in French, and nobody could show that the risk explanation had been understood.
The bank offered remediation totalling €2.3 million. The people question was whose pay should reflect the failure. Our policy deferred part of variable pay for every manager in the advisory businesses, beyond the population the rules required. The desk head and the regional wealth director had set quarterly volume objectives for unit-linked products and had approved the files. Their unvested deferred variable pay amounted to €61,000 and €38,000.
The chief executive was reluctant: the desk head had built the business and was likely to leave. The head of wealth called the failure systemic, because the bank had never supplied German documentation. Both points had force. I recommended applying malus in full to the two managers, who had the authority to raise the documentation problem and pressed for volume instead, while treating the advisers' failings as a training failure the bank owned. The remuneration committee agreed in June 2024.
The desk head resigned four months later. Over the following year about a fifth of the desk's savings moved with customers who followed him, and its revenue fell by 18 per cent in 2025. The advisers stayed and completed retraining. Suitability documents now exist in German, adviser language competence is tested before appointment, and file quality carries forty per cent of a desk manager's variable pay.
What I would do differently lies earlier. When the desk opened in 2019, I approved its staffing without testing anyone's written German, and I had never shown managers a worked example of how malus would apply. Both gaps were mine to close.