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Awards for Excellence 2016
In digital banking, traditional lenders across Europe are staving off new competition in areas such as payments and foreign exchange – while low rates, low growth and high regulatory costs make a branch network harder to sustain. Whether it is investing in new app-only banks like Atom and imaginBank – or in BBVA’s case, its own digital payments firm – banks are rising to the challenge. Lloyds’ decision to invest £1 billion in digital banking by 2017 is a sign of how seriously they are taking this.
But for an inaugural best digital bank award in western Europe the winner must be ING. Since the first days of ING Direct in the 1990s, ING has been at the forefront of digital banking, giving it a depth of experience that is the envy of other banks. It has unrelentingly shifted to digital channels in Belgium and the Netherlands and is one of the largest banks in Germany, despite its lack of a branch network.
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Ralph Hamers, ING |
While its corporate transaction offering is also heavily geared to digital innovations, the bank is now spreading its German retail model elsewhere in Europe, marking up particular success in Spain. Unlike some banks, its investments in digital banking are yielding very real results. But ING is not resting on its laurels. It rightly recognizes its advance in this area as its most valuable differentiating factor and it focuses obsessively on building that advantage. Not for nothing has CEO Ralph Hamers been called the Steve Jobs of banking.
Evidence that ING is in the vanguard of financial technology is not hard to find: trialling blockchain technology in fixed income trading; opening its bank in Belgium to allow fintech start-ups to test ideas; and gathering hordes of software developers from around the world in Bucharest in a 24-hour fintech hackathon.
Since December, more than 180,000 people in Spain have used Twyp, its peer-to-peer payments application that allows simple transfers such as repaying a friend for dinner or the cinema. It is also teaming up with US online lender Kabbage (in which it is also an investor) to do SME lending in Spain – no doubt further spurring its competitors to ever-greater efforts in digital banking.
