A clean break
A clean break
Cross-border divestiture · RBC Investor Services to CACEIS · 2023–2025
In short. A landmark, international divestiture of RBC's European asset servicing business to CACEIS, across seven countries under strict M&A confidentiality. I was Director of Communications at RBC and the principal communications architect for the transaction, reporting directly to the Executive Committee. When it completed, I moved across to CACEIS and led the integration.
Two institutions, nine countries, hundreds of institutional clients and thousands of colleagues, and a transaction nobody could discuss until the moment everybody could.
Divestiture communications have an unusual shape. It's not so much a launch as a handover. Passing a baton containing livelihoods, contracts, loyalties. The people affected - predominantly - did not choose the change they would be navigating.
Every audience is watching a different risk. Clients are asking whether their service will hold. Colleagues are asking whether their jobs will. Journalists are asking what it says about both firms. Regulators and Central Banks are asking whether anything has been said that shouldn't have been and if the continuity promised is credible.
I led a fifteen-person transversal working group of marketing and communications leaders, commercial and client engagement leads, product and business implementation teams, and reported into the Executive Committee throughout.
Confidentiality that inverts the normal job. Under M&A protocols, most of what you know cannot be said, and the press office is fielding queries from the Financial Times, Reuters and Global Custodian on a story you cannot brief out. The discipline is not messaging. It's holding a line consistently across all markets, allowing the flexibility for local nuance where it serves your objectives, while several hundred people know something and none of them can say it.
Dispersed but not fragmented. Regional leadership teams across all of the impacted markets were about to face journalists and their own colleagues on one of the most pivotal communications of their careers. Their instinct under pressure is defensive avoidance, which reads badly and travels fast.
A client base with loyalty to a disappearing brand. Hundreds of institutional clients had chosen RBC. They now had a contract with CACEIS, a French banking brand with limited exposure in the UK market and perhaps no relationship with them at all. I had a legacy sentiment baseline, historical CSAT and lagging NPS. Nothing forward-looking.
To me, the story you want to tell feeds the direction you travel. Narrative precedes strategy, and the brief precedes a plan.
Before anyone drafted anything, I took the working group through the communications outcomes alongside the M&A objectives: avoid negative coverage, avoid reputational damage, sustain client confidence, and build awareness of a French banking brand in a market that barely knew it.
Plenty of KPIs went on the table. My call was to narrow hard to the ones we could actually act on inside the transaction window – sentiment analysis, NPS, CSAT, share of voice, and brand mentions in a filtered UK segment. A measurement framework you cannot respond to during the event is a post-mortem, not a plan.
Rather than only briefing leaders on messaging architecture, I put them through simulations. A panel would press them the way a journalist or a room of anxious colleagues actually would, and we drilled constructive bridging rather than defensive avoidance – moving towards the difficult question instead of stepping around it.
We ran it across all countries, for press interviews and for town halls. It also surfaced, early and privately, which leaders were carrying doubts of their own. Better to find that in a rehearsal than on the day.
Related: the same preparation, one-to-one for an incoming charity chief executive - The same breath.
Announcement to Day One integration, under confidentiality protocols throughout. Each constituent team in the working group had their discipline, their expertise. We needed the framework, governance and tooling to enable them all synchronously.
Two systems carried the load:
A GenAI-enabled content management system I had secured board approval to build kept every asset in a single confidential environment with collaboration, dependency flagging and digital authorisation, and followed each piece through to channel execution.
I built a near real-time sentiment dashboard using CisionOne integrated via REST API to Tableau and shared that dashboard across the whole working group, rather than restricting it to leadership, because a team reading from the same primary source makes decisions together instead of waiting to be told.
At completion I moved to CACEIS as Head of Communications for clients, and inherited the integration side of my own transaction.
This was the call that mattered. The instinct after an acquisition is to introduce the acquirer. The visual identity had changed overnight and everything we published now carried a new logo. I argued for continuity as the messaging pillar instead – stabilise the client relationship first, and let the new brand enter gradually, once sentiment had begun to settle. Asking a client to absorb a new voice, a new style and a new outreach strategy in the same quarter they absorbed a new counterparty is asking too much of a relationship you have not yet earned.
Alongside it, an ambassador programme connected product owners and operational experts directly to reference clients as peer voices. It worked as communications channel and as intelligence signals, because clients told us through their questions what our content had failed to surface.
Zero negative national press in primary markets, across the full arc from announcement to Day One.
100% messaging alignment between regional executive teams and the global corporate strategy, through a period of rapid change in nine jurisdictions.
150,000+ impressions on the human-centred content programme that followed colleagues and leaders through their own readiness for transition.
And on the other side of the transaction, over the following eighteen months: a 45% reduction in client dissatisfaction measured from the point of acquisition, a 30% rise in advocacy scores, and a 20-point increase in alignment-with-values scores as the two cultures merged. Organic search for the acquirer's brand in the UK rose noticeably, which told us the narrative was travelling further than our own outreach.
Disciplines: M&A communications · Strategic communications · Media relations · Client communications · Executive coaching
Sector: Financial services
> The same breath - The same merger problem without the corporate machinery. Two charities, an incoming CEO, and no ExCo to enforce a single message.
> Follow the sun - What the same change discipline looks like turned inward, when the audience isn't clients or the market, but solely the colleagues whose work moves.