Fortis is striving to become the preferred employer in the financial services industry.

In 2007, we were proud to receive recognition in Best Employer Awards in our home markets. Intermediair, a leading Dutch management and careers weekly, selected Fortis as Best Employer in the Netherlands in its annual survey of 120 companies. Forty thousand Management and Economics graduates voted us ‘Preferred Employer’ in Belgium (Trendence survey). And we made a spectacular jump to second place in Randstad’s ‘Most Attractive Employer 2007 Award in Belgium’ survey, having only arrived in the top 20 in 2006.

We aim to strengthen our competitive advantage by developing a culture that helps our people reach their full potential and by deploying our human capital to accomplish our company’s goals. Like in 2006, we maintained our high average training rate of 4.6 training days per FTE. Our management development programmes continued to shape our talented future leaders this past year. A total of 1,368 managers completed our ‘Leadership for Growth’ programme, with 64 more receiving ‘Next Generation Leadership’ training.

We are taking major initiatives in further improving the training and development opportunities for our employees. Not only will we offer a variation of our successful ‘Leadership for Growth’ programme to welcome our talented new ABN AMRO colleagues, called ‘Connecting for Growth’, but 2008 will also be the year in which the Fortis University is established. This will create an integrated group-wide education institute where we will offer a series of newly designed business-focused training and development programmes.

The expertise and experience of ABN AMRO people are a key reason why its businesses are so attractive. We are successful because our people are talented, motivated and rewarded, and we want the same for the staff of ABN AMRO who join us. Our initiatives in this area are underpinned by the People Principles which we drew up in 2007. The principles express Fortis’s aim to retain the best talent from all the companies involved through a fair appointment process based on merit and competences, and in compliance with legal obligations. Five Redeployment Centres across the globe are coming on stream to identify and manage redeployment opportunities for staff across the operations of the banks, within the Netherlands and in other appropriate territories. The People Principles also underline our commitment to working constructively with works councils, trade unions and other representative bodies.

At Fortis we encourage our managers and staff to take control of their own careers. This year we helped them do this by furthering the company-wide rollout of electronic tools designed to track development needs and monitor performance. We continued to embed our one company culture of performance by encouraging employees to ‘deliver results’, ‘be mobile’ and ‘develop yourself’.

The Fortis Performance Management Model is now mandatory for all our managers worldwide. Our long-term objective is to offer this single cross-border performance appraisal process to all our employees.

We firmly believe at Fortis that a workforce that reflects the diverse group of customers we serve and the communities in which we operate makes us stronger as a company. This year we deepened our commitment to diversity in the broadest sense by launching a new Diversity & Inclusion policy and diversity action plans for each Fortis business. We also set up a new website as a practical guide: www.fortis.com/diversity.

Our employees’ enthusiasm for working at Fortis is reflected in the Talking about Fortis film at www.fortis.com/career.