How ING is Taking on the Big Four Using Agile

ING has been a huge hit with Australians since introducing no ATM transaction fees and being heavily featured in the book The Barefoot Investor, which has sold over 1.5m copies. The author, Scott Pape, wrote how ING achieved “a record 50% jump in customers this year”,whether by coincidence, after his book hit store shelves.

So what is happening behind-the-scenes of this bank. What is its’ secret sauce?

The Head of Agile Transformation at ING Australia, Chris Dyer, spent an evening with Sydney’s EBA meetup group to explain how ING is making their customer’s happy and taking market share from the big four.

“The (removal of) ATM fees is an interesting one because obviously this was an ING draw card for a long time. It was our market differentiation, especially from the big four. And then what happened is that the rest of the big four matched that”, he said.

“So, what happened then, is as an organisation we sat down and said: Okay, how do we now differentiate ourselves in the market?”

He explained how ING needed a new draw card to keep their existing customers satisfied.

“What we did then was introduce no global fees…And within six weeks we delivered that to market”.

In six weeks, from finding out the big four were matching their no ATM fees policy to releasing their new draw card: No transaction fees for global purchases.

Chris explains that to be able to do this in such a short amount of time, they required an embedded Agile mindset. There wasn’t another way they could do this, there was no time to ask ‘how are we going to behave?’ It had to be part of the existing culture.

So, what is an Agile mindset and how did they build this work culture that is reactive and nails the needs of their customers?

Watch Chris’ video below for the 5-minute version of ING’s Agile transformation. Or you can pour yourself a wine, sit back and deep-dive into the entire presentation here on EPiC’s YouTube channel.