Being ahead of the curve might not be a good thing at Capital One Financial Corp.

Richard D. Fairbank, Capital One’s founder, executive chairman, chief executive officer and president (yes, lots of official titles), said during the company’s earnings call yesterday that ING Direct might be too far ahead of its time.

“[I]n a few ways, they were maybe too far ahead of their time and this is not a change that everyone is ready to sign up for right now,” Fairbank said of the online bank, which Cap One purchased and now operates under the Capital One 360 brand.

Digital initiatives at Cap One apparently are not just rolling off the product development line there. Fairbank said Cap One was trying to solve the “inherent complexity” of banking, a theme we have been hearing about increasingly in recent weeks.

But the more and more customers that we can get into digital servicing, there’s a key thing there on the Retail Banking side, the more and more customers that we can get to really become digital bank customers instead of such heavy users of the branches. Even the role of things like smart ATMs that we put all over our network, these are important trends.

But they don’t happen automatically … they have to be actively managed to get the customer behavior changes and then to make sure that the money drops to the bottom line. We are also working to drive significant improvements in technology delivery. And really, the way that we do IT projects, these are very complex projects and we’ve done a lot of process redesigning that and there’s significant opportunity there. The — one of the big, big themes around banking is complexity. Banks have inherent complexity. But certainly, with all the things that have become part of what running a bank is these days, there’s a lot of leverage to complexity reduction and we’re all over this.

Fairbank sees tremendous opportunities in just reducing the operational complexity at Cap One.

But I think there are big opportunities there. There are big opportunities in procurement. Big institutions like our own have very big, third-party expense budgets. And to really, really drive best-in-class kind of procurement capabilities, this is incredibly important as well. So our entire — I mean, we are just laser-focused. Because I — as a guy who came out of the strategy business, I want to go — I want to say what I think — what we’ve always said, what is strategy? Strategy isn’t about bubble charts and just about market position. Strategy is about finding where the leverage is and driving great outcomes. The things we’re talking about here have tremendous leverage over a long period of time. And we are sizing them, driving them, and we want to make sure that, that’s going to be a key way from customers to economics to the customer experience that we stay ahead in this marketplace.

Amen, Richard. Amen.