ING’s value is more than its $40 billion in assets
Last week it was announced that ING Direct may soon have a for sale sign on it. A year after the divestiture of its American assets, the Dutch financial leviathan that owns it may continue to liquidate north of the border in a bid to repay government aid received during the financial crisis.
Call it the Eurobomb effect: as the EU’s financial worries worsen, the blast radius expands and North American assets become collateral damage. Of course a Canadian banker would probably not call $40 billion in assets damaged goods. If you could keep the customer base intact, it could represent both a welcome addition to the balance sheet and the elimination of a pesky competitor.
But there’s the challenge: keeping those customers. It’s one thing to sell a bank; it’s quite another to sell a brand.
And what a brand we have here. It’s one of the few in Canada—or anywhere—that’s not just image, but also substance. In other words, what it says is what you get. There’s no bait and switch, no trap doors, and no fees for anything. It’s hard to imagine customers wanting to give any of that up.
Peter Aceto is another thing customers won’t want to give up. He is the model 2.0 CEO, working diligently and genuinely to engage customers in social media channels and employees on the shop floor. He leads by example and walks the talk. This is that rare culture that strives to go beyond the brand playbook and actually live and breathe its precepts. No other bank in Canada has a corporate culture as strongly aligned as ING’s, or a CEO as in touch with customers as Aceto.
ING Direct Bank entered the market as a challenger and, 16 years later, remains in that role. Acquisition by a Canadian bank would end that, but that is an important—maybe the most important—part of its DNA. Its loss would have a significant impact on employees—and customers. Witness the backlash that happened when Capital One bought ING USA last year. You just can’t put a price on this part of the brand.
What are the options, then? The buyer could take the Cesare Borgia approach, completely absorbing the bank and its assets and erasing all traces of the brand and its culture. Or it could leave it as is, allow it to operate at arm’s length and leverage the power of the brand to continue on its customer-focused mission. But it would take a buyer with balls of steel and a strong appetite for ambivalence to allow ING to maintain its challenger status once it’s within the portfolio. We’ll be watching this one with great interest.
Will Novosedlik is head of brand experience at global innovation, customer insight and experience design firm Idea Couture.
This column originally appeared on Will’s blog, Blazing Tuque, on Aug. 8. Click here to read the original, “ING Direct Bank: Going, Going . . . Gone?”
