Retail customers who were not ‘invited’ to find another bank at the beginning of the summer following the announcement that ING would be , beware: a second wave of account closures will take place.
12,000? 15,000? Maria-Helena Macedo from the LCGB trade union admits that she has heard rumours of up to 30,000 new accounts, although .
The press conference by the LCGB and Aleba trade unions on Tuesday 24 September was organised after a one-hour meeting with management that very morning. It was an opportunity to insist that management engage in social dialogue and not “salami-slicing,” as Aleba vice-president Jean-Jacques Reiff called it, referring to the loss of three jobs here, four jobs there and five more later. “The dialogue was very constructive”, he notes. “ING’s management is very aware that everyone in the financial centre is watching them.”
“For the moment,” adds Macedo, “there is no social plan for 2024 or 2025. Their aim is clearly to keep everyone on until the new strategy for the bank and the group to which it belongs has been finalised.”
As a first step, the two unions insisted that the company should encourage internal mobility and, as an obvious corollary, proactively train those who would have to change jobs, methods or processes. “Management has said that there will be no redundancies for the time being,” says the LCGB representative.
Need to “map out” employees
“But there are no guarantees,” adds Reiff. “They know more than they’re saying. We’ve tried to find out more. It remains an uncertainty for people but we have to trust them.”
How many of the 960 employees remain? No precise answer has emerged, between those who have already left, sometimes to competing banks that needed talent for onboarding, and new roles. Sixty-four positions are open and, depending on the strategy, new needs may emerge, which make the more or less immediate future difficult to read.
“They’re going to have to map out their employees,” says Laurent Tresch, head of the Aleba delegation at ING. “They also need to understand that moving to Poland--where some of the KYC functions have already been outsourced--will not be accepted. There are tools like early retirement and end of career.”
“Behind this case,” he continues, “there is also a message for politicians and the CSSF: by authorising players to outsource, we are shooting ourselves in the foot in Luxembourg. Whether it’s to Poland or the Philippines…”
“Many jobs have already disappeared from the marketplace,” says the union’s vice-president. “And yet the knowhow is there!”
This article was originally published in .