Welcome, I'm Anastasia Kinsky, and I'm here at Money 2020 Europe, Amsterdam.
I'm very, very pleased to be joined by Daniele Tonella, who is CTO and management board member at ING.
Daniele, thank you for joining me.
Pleasure.
So.
You are both the CTO and board management.
Can you tell me what that means when it comes to focusing on technology transformation um in, in the company?
Yeah, look, essentially it means that we can take decisions in technology terms.
That are way closer to business than in the classical model where technology just has to do whatever visions come out and that creates also a lot of maturity in the use of technology.
So at ING the level of technology proficiency in the board is very high and that allows me to run a technology transformation which is more fundamental and more substantial than just buying tools.
It's something we've heard so much about here at the conference, which is this education point, and it may sound patronizing, but we still are sometimes on the back foot of that.
Um, what have you seen, you know, as your board has shifted around, you know, keeping technology at the center.
Of decision making.
What have you seen as a cultural culture transformation in the organization and how is that influencing decisions?
I mean, that education goes the other way around.
I mean, technology also gets a lot of education on what is important in the macro context of the bank and that education, that cultural transformation.
Essentially makes very clear the dilemma that we face where you have parts of the organization who want to go fast and go hard and parts of the organization like tech that say, well, yes, we can go fast, but we need to ensure that we maintain control, digital sustainability, that we can maintain bris, scalability, we maintain reliability, all the parameters that are a bit antihetic to speed, and that conversation is what makes culture.
Well, it's, it's like a smooth gear shift, you know, you've got to have a clutch in the right place.
You can't just constantly.
Be going back and forth.
Um, so in practice at ING, you know, I, I've heard you speak about, um, as you say, this, this push and pull as a sort of feng shui of technology.
Can you tell us about that a little bit?
Yeah, uh, digital transformation has been misread, I think, so long with I have a problem, I buy a technology, I solve my problem, and it never works.
Uh, it's more a question of uh managing complexity, simplification, adopting technologies, using them.
And in that universe, the feng shu example is the one that says, well, you can, you cannot just buy something on the edge of what you already have, you have to look at what you have inside your shop already and you have to maintain that complexity.
And simplification is effort, does not happen by itself.
It requires investment, requires vision, uh, it requires commercial convergence, it requires a business strate.
Strategy that aligns and that enables a technology consolidation and that's what I call the feng shui of technology is clean up what we have in the zoo to create also optionality to then effectively get new technologies in the house.
It's such an important part of it, the harmonization of all these stakeholders and all these parts.
We'll talk a little bit about what ING is doing differently to deliver this sort of simple personalized customer experience, because as you said, you can't just push technology into wherever you want, it needs to be at the end of the day what the end user wants.
Absolutely.
Well, there are a couple of things we are besides putting AI in focus, besides the scalability, simplification.
There is a deep transformation that I started 8 to 10 years ago, which was given on the one side through Agile.
We went full agile at scale and we transformed the way we develop software and the way we build our core banking systems.
That creates a flexibility that is now facilitating the transformation and the buildup on AI.
And the last bit is we are extremely active in listening to what the clients are telling us, both to us directly or to the market, you know, ratings or places where where they express what they think about us, and we flow that back to the system to to work essentially in reducing friction because that's what scares clients.
And it's the only way to go.
I mean, it's fascinating that the um the absence of listening to clients goes both ways.
Either people pushing too much digitalization when people didn't want it, or also not offering the digitalized services that, that, you know, maybe even the younger generations are, are looking for.
Um, so we're here at Money 2020.
What, what have you been most excited about?
I know you were speaking yesterday.
What, what, what has most caught your eye so far?
Well, there is of course a lot of attention on uh on stablecoins, on crypto.
Um, it's also interesting to see how, um, that space is still highly fragmented.
There are plenty of platforms, plenty of standards, plenty of technologies, and then I'm curious to see if some things were ready to emerge and become a standard.
And the other is, of course, AI, uh, which is a bit, uh, all over the place, where we are, we are exiting the hype cycle, we are entering the true experience.
We are sharing, we share what is really important and how to benefit from the technology and not just sprinkle it of everything and believing that magic happens.
Yeah, the magic happen.
And so in the next 2 to 3 years, what do you think we can expect?
Where should we be focused across the landscape for this harmonized cultural transformation?
Well, we focus a lot on scalability.
We have a scalable bank vision where we converge a number of customer journeys.
Or commercial offers.
We have a scalable technology platform where we converge a number of technologies into into global platforms.
We are transforming the way we develop software towards platform engineering and we are embedding AI in everything we are doing today.
Plus we are now starting to think, OK, what is beyond.
Using AI just to optimize optimize the process we have today.
Where is AI transformational in the sense of reinventing the value chain?
True transformation, transformation.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you.
We look forward to seeing further cultural transformation, harmonization, and feng shui.
Thank you for joining me, Daniela.
Thank you so much.
