Word: inglis
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...fledgling company, ING hired Kuhlmann, whose buttoned-up career in finance--by age 33, he was a vice president of the Royal Bank of Canada with his own private dining room--hid an edgier side, the side that rides a Harley and reads palms, a skill he picked up from his European grandmother. In ING Direct, Kuhlmann saw a revolution, a chance to fix the things he knew people hated about banks. Companies in other industries had succeeded with stripped-down versions of competitors' products--Southwest flew airplanes without assigned seats; Ikea sold design-minded furniture without assembling...
...Suggesting there is a McDonald's approach to banking is heresy," says Kuhlmann. But the no-frills strategy has worked. Since the Canadian trial, ING Direct has launched in eight more countries. In the U.S., where Kuhlmann is now CEO, ING Direct is the largest Internet bank, with more than half of the country's $90 billion in online deposits, according to market tracker SNL Financial. And without a single branch, ING Direct is the 28th largest bank of any kind in the U.S., as ranked by assets (and 24th by deposits), nipping at the heels of regional powerhouses such...
...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...