Bigger Story This article is part of ING's Annual Review 2015. read the 2015 Annual review

Our Strategic Priorities

To deliver on our Customer Promise and create a differentiating customer experience, we have identified four strategic priorities:

1. Earn the primary relationship

The better we know our customers, the better we will be able to empower them to make smart financial decisions and continue to be relevant for them. We can do this best if they do a range of banking with us – if we are the bank our customers go to for their daily transactions. We call that the primary relationship.

In 2015, the number of primary relationships grew by almost 7% to 8.9 million, putting us well on track to reach our goal of 10 million primary retail customers in 2017.

2. Develop data analytics

Developing analytic skills is essential to serving customers in a digital world. This is not only important for improving customer services, but also for preventing fraud, improving operational processes, reducing risks and generating services that go beyond traditional banking so we can stay relevant for customers.

To make this happen, an international Advanced Analytics team based in Frankfurt and Amsterdam acts as a centre of excellence and supports all business units. At the same time, local advanced analytics teams were established in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Poland and in Wholesale Banking.

3. Increase the pace of innovation to serve changing customer needs

Customer expectations, new technologies and new competitors are transforming the banking industry faster than anticipated. To address that, we need to increase the pace of innovation. We promote an internal culture of innovation and also partner with external parties with specialist knowledge to accelerate our capacity to innovate.

4. Think beyond traditional banking to develop new services and business models

Thinking beyond traditional banking is crucial given that disruption in the banking industry puts a significant portion of revenues at risk. To be successful, banks need to expand the concept of what a bank is and what it means to customers, by for example finding ways to be relevant to customers earlier in their purchasing decision-process.