ING DIRECT puts focus on technology

Speaking to The Adviser at the Australian Lending Awards in Sydney last month, Ms Claes said the lender was focussed on improving its broker service over the coming few months.

“We are in the process of rolling out several initiatives that will really help enhance our broker service proposition,” she said.

“At the end of last year we focussed on broker support, by giving each of our 7,000 plus broker partners’ direct access to credit assessors. The feedback we received from this initiative was really positive and we are keen to roll out a few more initiatives this year.”

Ms Claes said the lender would focus its energy on the technology space.

“We are going to leverage our DNA to make interfacing with our end customer and broker partners that little bit easier,” she said.

These initiatives follow yesterday’s ‘bank in a box’ technology solution.

The bank in a box solution was designed to allow new applications and services to be delivered to customers more rapidly.

ING DIRECT Australia required a highly automated and scalable private cloud solution that enables staff members to provision copies of the bank representing all the bank’s applications and services – almost five and half terabytes of data – instantly and seamlessly from software they use every day.

Prior to the integrated “Bank in a Box” solution, it took the team twelve weeks to provision environments hindering the time to market of critical projects. Today ING DIRECT Australia announced that the time to provision a copy of the bank is ten minutes effectively eliminating the cost to provisioning and relieving the constraint to the projects.

By fast tracking the time to market for new products, the company expects improved customer satisfaction and retention and to gain a critical competitive edge.