Daniele Tonella, international head of IT at ING Financial institution, tells Pc Weekly about his first 9 months within the job, which has to date seen him navigate 4 layers of tech.
The chief know-how officer (CTO), who describes himself as “a mechanical engineer by mistake” with a ardour for tech, began coding when he was 10 years outdated. At 18, on ending highschool and “with the self-confidence of that age”, he felt he knew know-how and determined to review mechanical engineering.
“My ardour was in tech, but it surely was too late to vary course, so I completed it,” he says. However he provides he “by no means stopped tinkering and coding on the aspect”, and when he accomplished his research, he moved into know-how.
Following his commencement, he labored in consulting on tech technique earlier than taking IT roles at finance corporations in his native Switzerland, in addition to France and Italy.
He left Italian financial institution UniCredit, the place he was head of IT, three years in the past, and launched into “a traditional portfolio” profession, with board and advisory roles, together with working with tech startups.
Tonella joined ING, which has about 39 million prospects and operates in retail and wholesale banking, as international CTO in August 2024. “If something at ING has a chip or line of code in it, it falls inside my broader duty,” he tells Pc Weekly. He leads about 15,000 IT workers internally – a couple of quarter of the financial institution’s complete workforce – and about 4,000 exterior IT professionals.
Quite a few tasks are ongoing at ING, together with these to help coming into new markets, regulatory compliance and the usage of synthetic intelligence (AI).
4 layers of IT
However Tonella’s broad focus has been on what he describes because the “4 layers of tech”.
“Basically phrases, [our] tech is layers made up of 4 large actions, with every one constructing on the one beneath.” This has seen him try to make IT dependable, management its high quality, introduce scalability and innovate.
He says the primary layer is reliability, and if that’s not supplied, it’s tough to contribute the rest. All I acquired was, ‘We’ve acquired these incidents right here and there, are you able to repair it?’ So, we’ve created a complete initiative to stabilise the underlying fundamentals.”
“If something at ING has a chip or line of code in it, it falls inside my broader duty”
Daniele Tonella, ING Financial institution
Tonella’s work right here was aided by a call made at ING in 2016, when in contrast to many conventional banks, it opted to maneuver away from utilizing mainframes, finishing their decommissioning in 2020.
“ING has a fairly trendy infrastructure. The group determined a few years in the past to maneuver away from mainframes and into an software stack primarily based on microservices and extremely modular,” says Tonella. “That was a really smart resolution.”
He says work to stabilise the IT infrastructure isn’t full, however ING ranks excessive amongst its friends for availability. “We imagine it’s secure sufficient to have a look at what’s above.”
Scalable tech platform
One of many layers above includes making a scalable tech platform with shared international companies for the whole enterprise throughout all its nations of operation. ING operates internationally, whether or not or not it’s a market chief within the Benelux area or a challenger in nations reminiscent of Italy, Spain and Australia.
For instance, in Italy, it has simply rolled out its cell banking app, OneApp, which Tonella says is a world normal. Earlier than this, the Italian enterprise had its personal separate cell banking app. “Globally, we now have a standard set of property and now we’re substituting the native ones with them,” he provides.
“With the worldwide normal, [regional operations] can enrich their providing to purchasers with companies that different banks within the group have developed on the identical framework,” explains Tonella. “You’re constructing as soon as, and it will possibly scale out.”
The OneApp cell app was developed by the financial institution’s IT group within the Netherlands, however it’s the international normal.
However ING has IT improvement groups “all over the place”, says Tonella, with hubs in Poland, Romania and the Philippines, the place it has “numerous engineers”, in addition to engineers in nations reminiscent of Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain, the place it operates.
Every nation can develop for its personal consumption, in addition to for international consumption. ING additionally has a central improvement group for the broader group.
The scalable tech platform is an ongoing venture, and one which triggered one other main problem.
High quality management
Tonella says when engaged on the scalable tech platform, he “observed shortly” that a number of the numbers wanted to display scalable tech have been lacking.
This led to a venture Tonella describes as “management”.
“It’s the whole lot round the fee accounting, round productiveness. It’s the measurements of the whole lot, which is numbers associated,” he says. “I wish to see numbers proven another way than what we now have in the present day. That is my management tower.”
Tonella says understanding the numbers is not only about operating the enterprise, but in addition altering it.
“When you’ve {hardware} or an software, it’s like having a automobile. In some unspecified time in the future, it will get outdated and you must purchase a brand new one. These investments emerge now and again, so how do I do know that we’re dedicating sufficient of the price range to this?”
He provides: “Additionally, how can we make sure that each initiative the financial institution needs to run is evident by way of how a lot it’s going to price, and what’s the income profit that we count on to have?”
Innovation
The fourth layer is the whole lot associated to innovation, together with reaching new markets and introducing tech reminiscent of generative AI (GenAI) – “something that was not there earlier than”, says Tonella.
“Innovation at ING tends to occur just about by itself,” he says. “Our staff are likely to really feel empowered to discover and try too.”
He describes the innovation layer as the place the financial institution is offering buyer worth by way of know-how.
Tonella says almost a decade in the past, ING took up agile improvement strategies, on the time when the Spotify mannequin was all the trend. ING reorganised round squads and tribes, that are small groups of lower than 10 folks allotted budgets to work on their concepts.
Innovation at ING tends to occur just about by itself. Our staff are likely to really feel empowered to discover and try too Daniele Tonela, ING Financial institution
He describes them as being like little startups inside ING.
Tonella says ING has a historical past of being modern, and though its buyer base of 39 million means it’s not as large as many rivals, he says the financial institution is forward of most relating to digital banking. “We have been a neobank earlier than neobanking was a factor,” he says.
Within the Nineties, it launched on-line retail financial institution ING Direct, which had no branches.
Tonella says the financial institution is repeatedly innovating, with GenAI a serious focus at current, which the financial institution is taking a “conservatively aggressive” method to.
“ING has set the inspiration for avoiding GenAI turning into a ‘tech toy’ dialog,” he says. “The proprietor of all GenAI initiatives is the chief analytics officer, who studies to the chief working officer (COO).
“GenAI is greater than know-how, after all. It’s know-how, however at its core it’s a metamorphosis pressure for the best way we do banking,” he provides.
The financial institution is enabling improvement round GenAI in 5 areas: know your buyer (KYC), name centres, wholesale banking to enhance buyer due diligence, retail for the hyper-personalisation of choices, and inside tech for engineering.
“We introduced in strict governance that targeted all exploration on GenAI on 5 areas, and solely underneath the management of the COO. That is vital as a result of AI has gained a whole lot of consideration and traction. With out this governance, and because of the entrepreneurial nature of our financial institution, we’d have seen bits of GenAI far and wide.”
