ING is continuing the overhaul of its innovation initiatives, decentralising from the core back to individual business units and combining innovation arm, ING Neo, with the Corporate Strategy team.
The latest reset comes two years after incoming CEO Steven van Rijswijk disbanded all of the bank's disparate innovation programmes and combined them into a single dedicated unit, ING Neo.
The reshuffle ultimately led to the departure of ING chief innovation officer and CEO of ING Ventures, Benoît Legrand who was sidelined in the revamp. Since then, chief operations and transformation officer Roel Louwhoff has departed for Standard Chartered. ING Neo also saw a quick-firechange in personnel, when inaugural chief innovation officer Annerie Vreugdenhil quit the bank at the end of last year to join rival outfit ABN Amro.
The bank has also shut down two of its most high-profile innovation launches, Yolt and Payvision, after concluding that they did not have sufficient scale to meet the bank's ambitions.
Explaining the latest shake-up, ING chief van Rijswijk, states: “To keep meeting - and exceeding - customer expectations in a fast-moving competitive environment, we have to stay on top of emerging trends and technologies and identify opportunities with the potential to have a real impact. The best way to achieve this is by sharpening our focus on a selected few promising initiatives and letting more of the core business innovation activities take place in our businesses, as close as we can to where we make a difference for our customers.”
At the same time, NEO will be folded into a new unit - the Group Strategy and Innovation department (GS&I) - which will begin operations in January.
GS&I will "focus on identifying disruptive, next-generation opportunities , concentrating on a selective number of high-potential, high impact initiatives," says van Rijswijk.