Word: inge
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...starters, phenomenally appealing interest rates. ING Direct pays 4.5% on a savings account, while the average account gives 0.46%, according to Bankrate.com Then there is the fast-food aesthetic: simple, inexpensive service. ING Direct offers exactly one type of savings account and one type of checking account. There are no fees and no minimum balances. Signing up online takes five minutes--not much longer than a stop at McDonald...
...tech-obsessed 1990s, plenty of other banks tried to woo customers to the Web, but ING Direct stood out with its cheeky and pervasive marketing ("Money doesn't grow on fees," says one orange-colored ad) and commitment to customer service. When customers call the toll-free number, a person--an actual person in Los Angeles, Minnesota or Delaware, not an automated menu, not an operator halfway around the world--picks up the phone...
During the dotcom crash, few Web banks survived, but ING Direct persevered. "When we were making all those big investments without too much return, I had to answer a lot of questions," says Michel Tilmant, who chairs the executive board of parent company ING in Amsterdam. But ING was committed to Kuhlmann and the ING Direct vision and spent the money to continue...
...personality cult hasn't hurt the company either. Headquartered in an old warehouse on the Christiana River in Wilmington, Del., ING Direct projects a Silicon Valleyesque energy and idealism that come straight from the top. Consider the Orange Code, a manifesto of sorts penned by Kuhlmann and chief operating officer Jim Kelly, which includes lines like "We aren't conquerors. We are pioneers." Kuhlmann rants about spend-happy Americans and the companies that feed their addiction by selling them credit cards--"the opium of consumerism." When the rest of the banking industry lobbied for a new bankruptcy...
...while, ING Direct keeps a laser focus on who its ideal customer is. Because the company sells bare-bones products at a slim margin, it needs low-maintenance customers. At the firm's New York City café, one of five token storefronts, manager Omar Woodard recently let an older woman walk away without an account after she worried aloud that branchless banking might be too newfangled. "Customers who don't fit our business model don't fit our business model, and that's totally O.K.," says Woodard. "The bank just wasn...