To Benoît Legrand, chief innovation officer at ING Group, open banking and fintech partnerships are changing the way the bank is meeting customer needs. The Dutch banking giant is embracing the open banking concept by positioning itself as an intermediary between customers, third-party fintech companies and other banks.

As Legrand put it, ING is striving to become the “companion of the customer.” He said the bank wouldn’t necessarily recommend its own financial products and services directly to all its customers, instead pairing them with the right provider through platforms like its money management app, Yolt.

Legrand has been with ING for nearly 25 years, starting out as an investment banker and later serving as president of ING Bank France, global head of fintech and CEO of ING Ventures, before moving into his current role in January 2018. The following is an edited version of his conversation with Bank Innovation.

How is ING approaching innovation?
We’re doing this in four blocks. The first is our labs in Singapore, Amsterdam and London, where we are focused on specific value spaces that best match the local expertise. We currently have about 30 different fintech initiatives that we’re nurturing, of which about 10 are coming to scale. [Because] it takes three to four years just to understand how things are going, we are just reaching a maturity level.

The second block is fintech partnerships. We have about 170 different partnerships running today and we’ve stopped about 80. We’re failing in many of them, which is fine because that’s part of it.

The third is investing in fintechs through our venture fund. We now have about 25 investments — minority investments, generally — in companies such as Kabbage, the small business lender.

The fourth is an innovation transformation scheme. We’ve built our own innovation methodology that combines design thinking, lean software development, startups and agile computing.

What considerations drive this strategy?
[We’re] moving away from a linear approach to banking — where we have a product, we sell a product, we maintain a product and we do the after sale — into more of a connected ecosystem where the customer is back at the center. We are offering customers a secure, effective, seamless environment in which they can buy and get the best products that they think are the best fit. This is a total shift in the approach.

What is the big opportunity for ING in the open banking era?
[It is] to further improve customer satisfaction, but also to attract new customers. We have 38 million customers, but there are about 500 million people in Europe, so we still see more room for growth.

What is Yolt, and why is it part of your innovation strategy?
Yolt is a money management platform that we launched in the U.K. two years ago, built on what we think the opportunities are from PSD2, meaning the opening up of the market and open banking in Europe. We are gathering all the accounts of our customers in one place, giving them insights as well as a better way to manage their money. We are about to reach 1 million customers and we’re taking in about 60% or 65% of the open banking volumes [meaning the exchange of data between banks through open banking] in the U.K. We’ve launched in France and Italy, too.

How will Yolt change the relationship the bank has with customers?
Customers are getting more control, and there’s also the possibility now to easily switch banks. Imagine you have a savings account with Bank A and another with Bank B, and Yolt is telling you, ‘The rate on this one is 0.2% and the rate on that one is 0.4%, so click here to transfer 10,000 euros.’ [Customers] want an actionable insight, they want to click on it and they don’t want to hear anymore about it. It’s putting pressure on banks to be more effective at serving customers and respecting customers. I think this kind of tool, potentially, has that kind of impact.