Artificial intelligence (AI) is available in many forms.
Projects involving the use of the technology for transaction monitoring, customer due-diligence and mortgage generation are in early production or on track, as the bank aims to do more with fewer resources and redistribute the human workforce.
According to Marnix Van Stiphout (ING COO), when AI is used in an operations process it can result in a 25% increase in productivity. However, he stressed the importance of its adoption, which is not only about people leaving.
Van Stiphout has been with the bank for 25 years and has held a variety of roles. He is responsible for business, finance and HR operations, and also takes care of analytics, KYC regulation, and transformation. As part of his broad role, he oversees the introduction of agentic artificial intelligence into operations in conjunction with the IT Department. Van Stiphout stated that ING released a chatbot for its retail franchises last year, and that for marketing, it uses AI to identify hidden affluent customers. Van Stiphout and his team are also working on a project that uses agentic AI for mortgage applications. He said: “We’ll also look at agentic artificial intelligence for products like mortgages. We will redo the way we work to get mortgages from our clients.” “They won’t need to speak to anyone, but a digital assistant to get all their data and do credit checks.”
Van Stiphout said that agentic AI generated mortgages will begin in 2026.
AI Knows Your Customers
During this time, the labor-intensive work in compliance, which is a lot of people, is being transformed into multiple projects that are either in the early stages of production or in the pipeline. ING is reworking manual workflows in the area of customer due diligence, or KYC as it is known under regulation. Van Stiphout said that the manual work in client due diligence (KYC) will be largely redone using a new model, based on the existing/available data. This way, we won’t have to ask our clients for all their data points.
Van Stiphout said that ING onboards customers largely digitally unless the client is complex: “Previously, people had to visit a branch to open an account. They were then asked 100 questions and required to provide all kinds of information.
We are now telling existing clients who need to be reviewed and new clients that we have so much data from public sources and behaviour data. This includes their banking habits with us and other banks. We can use the data in the model. If there are 100 questions that make up a typical customer due diligence, then we can use all the information we have to answer 70 or even 80 of them.”
“We will also look at agentic AI for products like mortgages, redoing the way we work with clients on getting mortgages from us”
Marnix van Stiphout, ING Bank
He said this is more than enough to draw a first conclusion. As a precondition of this, the bank needs its data actualised so it can run in the model, added Van Stiphout: “But if that’s the case and you’ve got a good working model with good outputs, which we have, then basically you largely no longer need to do the manual work.
“We don’t need to call customers every time or send an email, asking for something extra. So, customers gain in terms of speed and not being annoyed by ongoing information requests.”
Customer due diligence now takes seconds versus, “either a day in a very positive situation, or weeks and weeks in a very negative one”, depending on the extra information required, said Van Stiphout, adding that this allows staff to focus on real risk analysis rather than data gathering.
Van Stiphout expects certain work in operations to be done by 25% fewer people when AI is implemented but said the 25% can be used for growth and more complex tasks.
Transaction monitoring
The monitoring of transactions is a good example of redeploying employees to more complex roles. Van Stiphout, the bank’s AI manager, said that AI is already being used in this area. This gives humans more interesting jobs and allows for more investigations to be conducted. ING is working on more powerful models. This model is already in production.
We use analytics in our transactions monitoring models to speed up our investigation process. This allows us to close alerts more quickly and investigate more thoroughly if they are [standard],” he said. “When you do the vanilla stuff right, the risky stuff stays open and that means that the people can do this work, so productivity goes up and we can investigate more.”
As explained to Computer Weekly recently by ING CTO Daniele Tonella, the bank is enabling development around AI in five areas: know your customer (KYC), call centres, in wholesale banking to improve customer due diligence, in retail for the hyper-personalisation of offerings, and inside tech for engineering.
The CTO explained the bank’s “conservatively-aggressive” approach to AI, and why the COO oversees the development of it: “We introduced strict governance that focused on all exploration in AI in five areas and only under the COO’s control.” This is important, because AI has attracted a lot attention and traction. We might have seen AI everywhere without this governance and because of the entrepreneurial nature our bank.
Van Stiphout stated that he and Tonella communicate almost daily.
Separately Van Stiphout was the driving force behind the bank’s shift to a global delivery for operations around 2009 when it opened a captive center in Slovakia’s capital Bratislava. It has hubs now in Poland, Romania and Turkey as well as Spain and the Philippines. The hub in Manilla, the capital of the Philippines, is the largest with over 7,000 employees. Van Stiphout said that “almost anything in tech or operations can be sent to one of these hubs.” “We try to combine like-minded teams in technology and operations whenever possible.”
