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Customer Story

ING Becomes World’s First Bank to Implement Agile Company-Wide

Dutch bank becomes more data-driven and customer-oriented while cutting personnel costs by 30% after implementing Agile
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Related services
Agile

Industry
Finance

Company
Xebia

ING is a global bank with a Dutch background. It has 57,000 employees serving around 38.5 million customers, corporate clients and financial institutions in over 40 countries. The bank’s products include savings, payments, investments, loans and mortgages in most of its retail markets. The bank also provides specialized lending, tailored corporate finance, debt and equity market solutions, sustainable finance solutions, payments and cash management, and trade and treasury services.
Why
Continuously innovate products and services to exceed customer expectations and lead segment
What
A company-wide Agile transformation
How
Bring IT and business together through multidisciplinary teams

Taking the Lead

ING strives to exceed its customer expectations. It’s a goal that requires ongoing innovation. “Anyone who wants to take the lead in this segment must be capable of bringing new products and services to the market very quickly,” explained Arnout Bloys van Treslong, the tribe lead responsible for Tribe Experience Private Banking and Investing at ING. The ability to implement changes quickly is fundamental. “The ‘big techs’ and ‘fintechs’ will soon become our competitors,” said Heidi van Eijk, tribe lead of Experience Daily Banking. “We asked Xebia to help us create a culture that makes it possible to develop things faster and better, with an increased customer focus. It required us to greatly reduce the number of internal handovers and obstacles.”

Multi-Disciplinary Make-Over

Taking inspiration from companies such as Spotify, Netflix, and Google, ING introduced the Agile methodology as its way of working in 2015. This company-wide transformation empowered multidisciplinary teams to deliver relevant products more quickly and flexibly, offering customers a distinctive experience. “Xebia’s help and guidance, technology and innovation played an essential role in realizing our objective,” said Van Eijk, “This multidisciplinary approach is excellent for quickly testing whether improvements or new customer propositions are striking in the market because it allows you to get immediate feedback and develop further based on that feedback.”

“We are moving in the right direction. The organization will benefit from this in the coming years, and customers will notice the difference.”
ING
Arnout Bloys van Treslong The tribe lead responsible for Tribe Experience Private Banking and Investing at ING

It Takes a Tribe

With about one-third of jobs disappearing, it was a significant process, rolled out in a short period of time. “Xebia helped tremendously to make the Agile transformation a success,” said
Robert-Frank Hofland, lead of One Analytics, the tribe that analyzes customer data and builds predictive models. “Xebia provided support for the Agile coaches, guided the tribe leads, reminded us that we had to stay alert, and helped us monitor things and gain confidence.” Van Eijk described some specific improvements, “In the past, the turnaround time of a development process for a marketing campaign or brand activation was ten to sixteen weeks. Now it’s only two or three weeks.” Hofland added, “We have the same output, but at lower costs and with fewer people.

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