Ignore the stereotype of Amsterdam as a blissed-out idyllic retreat. Andy Muncer did. For all the family-friendly benefits of Dutch life, what truly attracted him was the city’s growing reputation as a financial hub and home to some of the world’s largest companies.

 

So, while he wasn’t there to put his feet up, even he couldn’t have predicted that his move would coincide with a period of sector-wide crisis, aggressive competition and almost revolutionary changes in the form and scope of corporate communications.

 

However, the global head of corporate communications at ING Wholesale Banking sounds like he’s never been happier. In a company that meets the banking needs of corporations, large multinationals, and financial institutions, he’s aware that it’s in one of the toughest periods in its 200-year history.

 

“Trust has gone from the industry, whether you were part of the problem or not,” he says. “The key challenges are how to restore it, but also how to differentiate.” And it’s clear that’s a challenge he’s relishing.

 

It could have been very different for Andy. After graduating with a first class honours degree in politics from the University of Sussex, two obvious careers presented themselves. It looked like a straight choice between a life in public affairs (the final year of his degree has focused on parliamentary lobbying) or fashion PR – he’d spent his school and university holidays working for a ladies’ swimwear catalogue, and had a job lined up with a Sussex PR agency.

 

But when his intended employer lost its key account just before he joined, he was forced to reassess. That agency at least had a strong network of contacts. And it was through these that he found a job as press and parliamentary liaison officer with the Independent School Information Service, an organisation based in Westminster representing more than a thousand feepaying schools.

 

“You do learn that a good network of contacts is important – it’s often someone you know in the past who becomes influential in your future.”

 

This was in the run-up to the 1992 General Election and Andy was thrust into a role that was “50% lobbying and 50% media relations”. At the time, ISIS was seeking to retain the charitable status of independent schools and Andy was involved with lobbying heavyweights such as Education Secretary Ken Clarke and his shadow Jack Straw. But, despite the cut and thrust of public affairs, “I found it was the press side of the job that I really loved.”

 

Still only 22, Andy continued to mine a furrow in political communication. Just after the election, he moved to a new role within Lewes District Council as PR and marketing officer before moving in 1993 to a higher-profile role at Labour-held Crawley Borough Council, charged with creating a marketing communications function.

 

In 1995 came his move to a world-leading financial hub, when he was approached by Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance in London, the global certification body for management systems. He moved to the City as LRQA’s press and PR manager where he developed and implemented LRQA’s worldwide PR strategy, covering the network of over 40 offices.

 

His stay there was relatively short but he was enamoured enough with life in the Square Mile to join one of its most venerable institutions. He was approached by the London Stock Exchange and joined the press and marketing communications department.

 

The LSE was coming through a turbulent phase. It had recently failed to move to an electronic trading platform and had sacked its CEO but, back then, it was still the dominant force in the City – as regulator, listing authority and trading system. Andy was brought in initially as head of media relations, before becoming the overall head of communications.

 

“It was the height of the stock exchange,” he recalls. “Our workload was very heavy on the media relations side, but we were also doing a lot in the way of public affairs, liaising with all the big banks who were our member firms. I had a team of 30 people and a budget of over £6.5 million. We developed its online communications, the beginnings of call centre for member firms and private investors, and controlled branding and events. It was the full suite of communications.”

 

Andy dealt with Parliamentary Select Committees and coordinating lobbying campaigns, and managing the promotion of numerous new initiatives to city professionals and key media. This included the new electronic trading system (SETS), the formation of the European Stock Exchange Alliance, the announcement of the demutualisation of the Stock Exchange and the launch of a new technology market (techMARK)

 

But Andy’s role was far from a reactive one, channelling messages to stakeholders. He identified areas that would radically modernise the LSE’s communications set-up, including the construction and marketing of the new £2 million City Media Centre, the first independent live broadcast facility in the Square Mile.

 

After four years at the LSE, Andy sought a new challenge. He was offered a role at ING, the Dutch financial services firm, initially as head of communications for one of the corporate and investment banks the Group had acquired (ING Barings), before acceding to his current role of group head of corporate communications for the combined global Wholesale Bank. “I was brought in on the PR side,” he says. “They wanted to go from being a small Dutch brand to a really big global player.”  

 

He’s now been there for ten years – an impressive innings in the fast-shifting arena of communications. “In the early part of my career I rapidly moved through jobs, generally moving on after a couple of years” he admits. “It was about time I settled in one role for a while.”

 

In his decade at ING, he’s seen “a hell of a lot of change,” he says. “The Group has grown massively. We’ve gone from having 40,000 employees to 130,000.”

 

His tentacles extend to just about every facet of the group’s communications and branding. From developing a new value proposition to reposition the bank, to implementing global advertising campaigns (winning the 2008 European Excellence Awards for Best International External Campaign) to developing a global employee engagement, including the launch of a global employee magazine. He has also been instrumental in the rebranding of ING Group’s wholesale banking interests. He’s even responsible for the bank’s art collection.

 

But undoubtedly the key change under his remit has been a top-to-bottom restructuring of the communications function. “We changed to in-house agency model in which individual products and business lines are treated as clients.”

 

This has reaped unquestionable benefits. “We sold the idea primarily on revolutionising communication in the organisation and cost savings. But it’s been incredibly successful in terms of efficiency, consistency and control. It wasn’t a decision taken lightly. We looked at other companies such as Shell and really looked at how it worked.”

 

Under the agency model, each client has account manager. And the firm is able to accurately gauge how much time is spent on projects and what each costs, allowing it to compare these internal costs with the market.

 

“We set out to reduce costs by 15%,” says Andy. “They’re now down by 50%”

 

The second key trend Andy has observed lies in the growing importance of the brand, stepping out of the shadows of a preoccupation with PR. “It’s moved from pure communications to marketing communications,” he says. “When I started working, if you were in charge of press, you were essentially head of comms. Companies were often not interested in any audience other than the media. Now there’s been a move to marketing comms, with communication almost taking more of a lead in the business – in corporate banking, the bankers used to rule. But now the nuances and differentiators in the products themselves often come from marketing. You need to find a different approach into them.”

 

Of course, the global financial meltdown has been a key driver in the way that the financial services sector communicates. But ING wasn’t caught cold.

 

Because it was already reassessing its behaviours, it even stole a march on its competitors. Before the onset of the financial crisis, the bank’s major competitor – ABN AMRO – was the subject of a takeover bid. So ING undertook extensive client research. “It began in 2008 and then continued into the crisis. It meant we had insights into what clients wanted from a bank. They’re not passive takers of products anymore. That’s changing communications.”

 

Working with international marketing strategy agency VODW, its research found that 40% of trust in a bank was defined by the daily provision of services.

 

ING’s retail banking division in the Netherlands took the discussion to its customers with board members and senior managers putting themselves in front of customers and letting them question them about the crisis.

 

But that was the retail banking arm. “In investment banking, the C-suite has fewer opportunities to get meaningful dialogue with their peers.” Andy set out to address that, organising CEO and CFO breakfast and dinners for small groups of banking leaders, as well as larger event s featuring the likes of Alan Greenspan and Nouriel Roubini. “We let the dialogue take its natural course.”

 

From a professional perspective, Andy admits that the banking crisis has been “interesting”.

 

“I’ve been through downturns before,” he says. “I was at LSE when the tech bubble burst. But that was nothing in comparison to this. Everyone just froze for months. Banks were disappearing – some physically, some just out of the press.” That wasn’t a trap that ING fell into. “We’ve has always been very fortunate with having leaders who place value on the brand.”

 

“I always like to look for the positives, for the opportunity,” he says. ”The positive thing here is that it’s levelled the playing field in being able to define your brand. People are having to understand what customers want and then respond. Banking adverts used to say ‘We’re big, we have this many people, we’re in this many countries.’ That was it. Now we’re seeing very different campaigns.”

 

So it’s been a decade of change, upheaval but also progress. Not that Andy is resting on any laurels. He readily identifies three challenges going forward.

 

Firstly, he has to manage radical internal change. ING is to bring its retail arm, ING Wholesale Banking and ING Direct together as one group. “That’s going to be a huge challenge, especially in internal communications.

 

“Secondly, we have to restate our brand post-financial crisis. And thirdly, we face the challenge of our competitors quickly returning to the market.”

 

ING had done much to exploit the gap left by badly bitten peers. “Research shows that the ones that continued to invest during a downturn are the most successful. We kept our spend constant over the last three or four years and it pays off.”

 

But the lull won’t last. “Some of them realise they cut too deep,” he says. “They’re now investing in comms, so that’s going to be a challenge.

 

“We’re also making ourselves much more open. One common client complaint of all banks was that relationship managers weren’t visible. They want banking the way it was meant to be. So we put our people and their contact details into adverts .We knew we’d get journalists phoning and a few crank calls, but it’s paid off. A leading academic, who was known to be quite critical, was asked what he thought. He said we were doing exactly what banks should be doing.”

 

For all his 100-mile-an-hour thought process, Andy sounds remarkably settled. That may be down to his decision three and a half years ago to move to Amsterdam with his wife and four children. “Until then I’d come across now and then for individual projects, then I commuted for a while, which meant I never saw my family .”

 

Now close enough to the office to cycle to work, he describes the Netherlands as “a very easy country, very family friendly. And it’s a really good hub. A lot of international companies have bases over here, such, Philips, Starbucks and Nike.”

 

And while the better work-life balance has improved his tennis, his Dutch is, he says, just as bad. “I did try learning it when I first joined but was told, ‘Andy, we’ve not brought you here to teach us to speak Dutch’. So I ditched it and concentrated on the job.”