Christian Dekoninck

Christian’s experience in Leadership, Strategy Implementation and Sales Management has been built over a career of 25 years in key Sales and General Management roles in the Banking industry, from Branch Manager to Distribution Head. He has a proven track record of being an agent of change, positively impacting the sales and financial results for different banks in Belgium, France, Germany and Poland. Christian is people oriented with a hands-on approach and special attention to coaching and development. He strongly believes that both customer and employee satisfaction are the cornerstones to success.

Professional background Christian joined Citibank in Belgium and developed his banking career from Branch Manager in 1988 to Regional Director for Northern Belgium in 1999. After his first international experience in Paris (1996 to 1998), where he successfully opened a flagship CitiGold Branch on the Champs Elysees and became part of the local management team, he was promoted to Regional Director tasked with restructuring the Branch network in Flanders. Subsequently, he was appointed Managing Director of the call centre in Aachen, Germany, turning it into a profit centre in only 18 months by maximizing tele-sales and direct sales both for investments and loans and optimising the back office activities (loan processing) on all service levels.

In 2003 Christian moved to Poland to take the position of Managing Director of the Citi Handlowy network. He is credited for building one coherent, strong retail network (over 200 branches/1800 staff) integrating the former Handlowy, CitiGold, Corporate and CitiFinancial (consumer finance) branches into one unit to maximize revenue and cost synergies. Other keys to success were the introduction of a new branch model and setting up a Direct Sales Agents network and tele-sales unit. He managed a financial turnaround resulting in a positive ebit of $32m in 2006 and $54m in 2007 compared to a loss of $18m at the end of 2003.

In 2009 he became Managing Director of the even larger Branch network (400 Branches/ 3,000 staff) of Kredyt Bank (KBC group), taking responsibility also for both Private Banking and the call centre. During his first year he improved cost-to-income ratios from 72% to 56%. In subsequent years, sales activity tripled in two years’ time to a record high of 2.5 sales/fte/day. Thanks to the implementation of a new Private Banking strategy the PB customer base grew by 22% and investment sales reached a record level of over 100m Euro/month gross (50m Euro net) in June 2011.

Education and qualifications Christian holds a Master in Law degree from the University of Leuven ( KUL), Belgium.