Interview: Daniele Tonella, CTO, ING
Daniele Tonella, global head of IT at ING Bank, tells Computer Weekly about his first nine months in the job, which has so far seen him navigate four layers of tech.
The chief technology officer (CTO), who describes himself as “a mechanical engineer by mistake” with a passion for tech, started coding when he was 10 years old. At 18, on finishing high school and “with the self-confidence of that age”, he felt he knew technology and decided to study mechanical engineering.
“My passion was in tech, but it was too late to change course, so I finished it,” he says. But he adds he “never stopped tinkering and coding on the side”, and when he completed his studies, he moved into technology.
Following his graduation, he worked in consulting on tech strategy before taking IT roles at finance firms in his native Switzerland, as well as France and Italy.
He left Italian bank UniCredit, where he was head of IT, three years ago, and embarked on “a classic portfolio” career, with board and advisory roles, including working with tech startups.
Tonella joined ING, which has about 39 million customers and operates in retail and wholesale banking, as global CTO in August 2024. “If anything at ING has a chip or line of code in it, it falls within my broader responsibility,” he tells Computer Weekly. He leads about 15,000 IT staff internally – about a quarter of the bank’s total workforce – and about 4,000 external IT professionals.
Numerous projects are ongoing at ING, including those to support entering new markets, regulatory compliance and the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
But Tonella’s broad focus has been on what he describes as the “four layers of tech”.
“In general terms, [our] tech is layers made up of four big activities, with each one building on the one below.” This has seen him strive to make IT reliable, control its quality, introduce scalability and innovate.
He says the first layer is reliability, and if that is not provided, it is difficult to contribute anything else. All I got was, ‘We’ve got these incidents here and there, can you fix it?’ So, we’ve created a whole initiative to stabilise the underlying fundamentals.”
“If anything at ING has a chip or line of code in it, it falls within my broader responsibility”
Daniele Tonella, ING Bank
Tonella’s work here was aided by a decision made at ING in 2016, when unlike many traditional banks, it opted to move away from using mainframes, completing their decommissioning in 2020.
“ING has a quite modern infrastructure. The group decided many years ago to move away from mainframes and into an application stack based on microservices and highly modular,” says Tonella. “That was a very wise decision.”
He says work to stabilise the IT infrastructure is never complete, but ING ranks high among its peers for availability. “We believe it is stable enough to look at what is above.”
One of the layers above involves creating a scalable tech platform with shared global services for the entire business across all its countries of operation. ING operates across the world, whether it be a market leader in the Benelux region or a challenger in countries such as Italy, Spain and Australia.
For example, in Italy, it has just rolled out its mobile banking app, OneApp, which Tonella says is a global standard. Before this, the Italian business had its own separate mobile banking app. “Globally, we have a common set of assets and now we are substituting the local ones with them,” he adds.
“With the global standard, [regional operations] can enrich their offering to clients with services that other banks in the group have developed on the same framework,” explains Tonella. “You’re building once, and it can scale out.”
The OneApp mobile app was developed by the bank’s IT team in the Netherlands, but it is the global standard.
But ING has IT development teams “everywhere”, says Tonella, with hubs in Poland, Romania and the Philippines, where it has “lots of engineers”, as well as engineers in countries such as Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain, where it operates.
Each country can develop for its own consumption, as well as for global consumption. ING also has a central development team for the wider group.
The scalable tech platform is an ongoing project, and one that triggered another major challenge.
Tonella says when working on the scalable tech platform, he “noticed quickly” that some of the numbers needed to demonstrate scalable tech were missing.
This led to a project Tonella describes as “control”.
“It is everything around the cost accounting, around productivity. It is the measurements of everything, which is numbers related,” he says. “I would like to see numbers shown in a different way than what we have today. This is my control tower.”
Tonella says understanding the numbers is not just about running the business, but also changing it.
“When you have hardware or an application, it’s like having a car. At some point, it gets old and you need to buy a new one. These investments emerge once in a while, so how do I know that we are dedicating enough of the budget to this?”
He adds: “Also, how do we ensure that every initiative the bank wants to run is clear in terms of how much it’s going to cost, and what is the revenue benefit that we expect to have?”
The fourth layer is everything related to innovation, including reaching new markets and introducing tech such as generative AI (GenAI) – “anything that was not there before”, says Tonella.
“Innovation at ING tends to happen pretty much by itself,” he says. “Our employees tend to feel empowered to explore and strive too.”
He describes the innovation layer as where the bank is providing customer value through technology.
Tonella says nearly a decade ago, ING took up agile development methods, at the time when the Spotify model was all the rage. ING reorganised around squads and tribes, which are small teams of less than 10 people allocated budgets to work on their ideas.
Innovation at ING tends to happen pretty much by itself. Our employees tend to feel empowered to explore and strive too
Daniele Tonela, ING Bank
He describes them as being like little startups within ING.
Tonella says ING has a history of being innovative, and although its customer base of 39 million means it’s not as big as many competitors, he says the bank is ahead of most when it comes to digital banking. “We were a neobank before neobanking was a thing,” he says.
In the 1990s, it introduced online retail bank ING Direct, which had no branches.
Tonella says the bank is continuously innovating, with GenAI a major focus at present, which the bank is taking a “conservatively aggressive” approach to.
“ING has set the foundation for avoiding GenAI becoming a ‘tech toy’ conversation,” he says. “The owner of all GenAI initiatives is the chief analytics officer, who reports to the chief operating officer (COO).
“GenAI is more than technology, of course. It is technology, but at its core it’s a transformation force for the way we do banking,” he adds.
The bank is enabling development around GenAI in five areas: know your customer (KYC), call centres, wholesale banking to improve customer due diligence, retail for the hyper-personalisation of offerings, and inside tech for engineering.
“We brought in strict governance that focused all exploration on GenAI on five areas, and only under the control of the COO. This is important because AI has gained a lot of attention and traction. Without this governance, and due to the entrepreneurial nature of our bank, we might have seen bits of GenAI all over the place.”
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