ING Private Banking has big ambitions and a simple set of numbers well describes the scale of its aims.

ING Private Banking has big ambitions and a simple set of numbers well describes the scale of its aims. Over the next three years, it intends to sharply increase the number of its full-time employees by about 35 per cent to 2,650.

That is going to be quite a feat. After all, the difficulty of hiring high-quality relationship managers and other key staff is a recurring theme of reports on the global wealth management industry. But as far as Bernard Coucke is concerned, it is achievable and necessary.

“Private banking has been one of the most attractive businesses within the banking industry and it looks set to remain so for the next few years. ING will continue to invest to accelerate the growth of its private banking business,” Mr Coucke, deputy global chief executive for ING Private Banking, told WealthBriefing in a recent interview.

He is certainly confident: “Our objective to become one of the top 20 players over the next few years has not changed.”

There is no room for complacency, however. Mr Coucke said that hiring the right people for the job was proving “increasingly difficult”.

“In countries where we have a large branch network, it is relatively easy to find within the networks the next generation of private bankers. In the offshore countries, especially in
Asia, where there is now a real shortage of private bankers, it is more difficult,” he said.

With such staff shortages in mind, Mr Coucke said one of the main challenges to the business is an increasing demand from clients for more sophisticated financial products and providing innovative financial services. But although he does not rule out buying other firms as a way to solve staff shortage issues as well as deliver more products, Mr Coucke is far keener on organic growth.

“We prefer to create goodwill instead of buying it. Currently a lot of the smaller private banks are priced at a premium or not for sale. But we will continue, of course, to look at suitable bolt-on acquisitions and seize the opportunities if they arise,” he said.

“Most private banking players are a unit of a large bank. There won’t be consolidation of private banking without consolidation of parent banks,” he said.

ING Private Banking is already a significant player, if not in the same bracket as the wealth divisions of UBS or Credit Suisse, for example. To the ordinary citizen living outside of the Netherlands, ING Group is mainly known as the provider of products such as internet savings accounts. However, its private bank is not insignificant: it has total assets of €57.4 billion ($89.1 billion). The private bank is an important part of the ING pie. Its assets make up about 12 per cent of ING’s total third party assets under management.

Even so, ING Private Banking has seen itself eclipsed, if not necessarily permanently, by its local rival Fortis, which last year bought private banking assets from ABN Amro, almost doubling Fortis’ private bank assets to about €225 billion.

Mr Coucke, like a number of other private banking executives, regards
Asia as a crucial market to expand his firm’s business.

“Like many banks, ING wants to further expand into the Asia-Pacific region, where population growth and per capita wealth is growing faster than in
Europe. However, these can be challenging markets to break into, not only because of the competition but also because of the restrictions some countries such as China and India have on foreign ownership in the banking sector,” he said.

Mr Coucke said ING wants to develop private banking operations with Asian partners such as ING Vysya in
India and Bank of Beijing in

China. ING Vysya, for example, was established as far back as the 1930s – a reminder that the Dutch-headquartered business has been around in
Asia for a long time – and has more than 400 branches. With its 44 per cent stake in that business, Mr Coucke says his firm is the only non-Indian bank with such a large stake in a retail banking network in

India.

Where a large retail bank leads, a private bank is unlikely to be far behind, especially in a nation such as

India that is riding the crest of an economic wave. Mr Coucke’s firm is certainly determined to reign among the private banking elite if it is at all possible. What is for sure is that if ING does not take up the challenge, there are plenty of rival firms that will.