Here's a nice interview with Michel Tilmant, Chairman of ING. ING Direct, the Internet-based savings bank has been highly successful in the US.
He talks about the success of ING Direct and has quite a few radical thoughts on banking and how it is done:
- "For us, cross-sell is not what we want to do, because we want to keep it simple. We know that out there, the largest pool of earnings in the retail banking world comes from savings and mortgage — those are the only two things that we want to do. If you try to cross-sell too many products, you confuse the clients about what you are and your costs escalate exponentially. "
- "..when you talk about banking, you think about branch networks. And branch networks add a cost that can only be justified by cross-selling. But we have chosen another distribution alternative, which is much more cost-efficient but also requires that we focus on what we try to do."
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