Learning which sentence a customer reads first

The first advertisement I worked on for a bank never ran. In 2001 I was a junior account executive at Maelbrouck Advertising in Brussels, and our client, a regional lender, wanted a poster built around a single interest rate. The copywriter had set the number at a size that left no room for the condition attached to it. My account director sent the layout back with one question pencilled beside it: what will someone believe if they only read the number? I have asked it of almost every piece of work since.

I grew up in Eupen and studied communication sciences at the Durvelaine Institute of Communication, completing my master's degree in June 2000. Moving between German, French and Dutch from childhood made me attentive to how a phrase lands with a reader who did not write it. At the agency I learnt the practical side of the trade: briefs, production schedules, research groups and the uncomfortable meeting where a client hears that the concept they like will not work.

In June 2003 I moved client-side to Ravelinne Consumer Credit in Liège, which offered instalment loans and car finance. Its legal team reviewed every advertisement, and I learnt to treat the reviewer as the first reader rather than the last obstacle. I also saw the commercial pull of a low monthly figure, and how often customers called afterwards to ask what the total would be.

Corvelinck Bank recruited me in March 2007 to run marketing support for its branches in Wallonia and the German-speaking east. Eighteen months later, in the autumn of 2008, customers came into those branches asking whether their savings were safe. Head office had answers; branch staff did not always have them in a form they could use at the counter. For several weeks my team produced a daily question sheet with legal and treasury colleagues, so that staff could answer precisely, including when the honest answer was that a matter had not yet been decided. It was the clearest lesson I have had that marketing is also responsible for what a bank says when nobody planned to say anything.

From 2011 I led retail communication at Corvelinck, which included the fourteen million letters the bank sent each year. We rewrote 120 standard letters, tested them with customers and more than halved the share that generated a follow-up call. The work was unglamorous, and it changed my view of what a brand means for a bank. A customer's opinion of us is formed as much by a rate-change notice as by a television campaign.

In 2016 I joined Quellmont Direct, an online-only bank owned by a Belgian insurance group, as marketing director. We grew from about 140,000 customers to 410,000 in under five years, largely through rate-led acquisition. The growth was real, and so was the instability: when a competitor moved its rate, a large share of our newest deposits followed. In 2019 I persuaded the chief executive to move a quarter of the promotion budget into onboarding and service communication. Deposit growth slowed for two quarters, while the share of customers still active after two years rose from 46% to 61%.

I joined Vaerenbosch Savings Bank as chief marketing officer in March 2021. It is owned by its cooperative members, and many of its customers have banked with it for decades. That history is an advantage and a responsibility. Long-standing customers are the people most likely to hold an older account on poorer terms, or to depend on a branch the network can no longer justify. My work here has been about saying uncomfortable things clearly: the conditions on a rate, the reasons a branch is closing, the limits of an environmental benefit we cannot measure.

I lead through a few fixed habits. Every significant campaign is read by someone from complaints and someone from a branch before it is approved. Every claim has a named owner of the evidence behind it. My managers know that a lower response with fewer surprised customers is a defensible result, and that I will defend it to the executive committee. I disagree openly with treasury and network colleagues when I need to, and I try to make the trade-off visible rather than win the argument.

Outside the bank, I have served since 2019 on the unpaid board of Kervelinde Money Advice Network, a non-profit association that helps households with debt problems. It has shown me what a board does with limited information and money, and how differently a bank's letters read to someone already behind on payments. I am now preparing for a first non-executive role in a consumer-facing company, where I hope to bring the question I was handed in 2001.

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