ING beefs up global support hub

Dutch financial giant ING has unveiled plans to expand its global shared services hub in the Philippines to support the rapid demand for processing services from its wholesale banking operations across Asia and Europe.

After opening its first hub in 2014 and doubling its staff count from 250 in 2015, ING Business Shared Services Inc. is moving to a new and bigger office this June to accommodate more in-house processing activities.

ING expects to continue growing its staff strength over the next few years to eventually expand its occupancy from the current four floors to eight floors of the newly built World Plaza of Daiichi Properties on 5th Avenue corner 30th Street in BGC, Taguig City.

“The office expansion demonstrates our stronger commitment to the Philippine BPO sector, which is expected to earn close to $40 billion and employ two million workers by 2020,” Cees Ovelgonne, head of ING’s shared services center in the Philippines, said in a press statement Monday.

“This expansion is a significant move to further harmonize services and shared technology throughout the bank, ultimately enhancing ING clients’ experiences globally,” said ING’s global chief operations officer and chief transformation officer Roel Louwhoff.

ING started 27 years ago as a representative office in the Philippines, eventually becoming the first foreign bank in the country to be upgraded into a universal bank. In 2013, it opened the ING Global Services Operations (GSO) to offer processing services for lending, reconciliation and payments, and static data management services to support some of ING’s wholesale banking branches in Asia, namely the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, China and Japan.

The shared services center will also handle the back-end processing needs of ING’s corporate audit, legal, risk management and financial services, among others. —DORIS DUMLAO-ABADILLA