What is “socially & environmentally responsible”?

It shouldn’t. I think it’s great as a symbolic act, but signing up doesn’t suddenly make us ‘socially and environmentally responsible’. It’s about what we do everyday.

In countries like India and Thailand, there is massive inequality in standards of living. Our mission is to help people manage their financial future. The first step is to help ensure people have a future, through education.

The ING Chances for Children programme does great work at the regional level, alongside all kinds of local initiatives. Support from our staff has been fantastic and I’ve joined them several times visiting all the schools we support, taking the kids out for the day, and distributing books and sports kits.

The honest answer is it’s never enough. The scale of the problem is so gigantic and there are cities there with populations as large as some Western countries. But when I talk to my wife about this issue, she always stresses that you have two choices: either you go out there and do something, even if it's for just one child. Or you do nothing, in which case nothing will change for that child.

Whatever you do, it’s never going to be enough. But doing something is better than doing nothing. It will make a difference to that one child.

I was used to visiting schools on behalf of ING in a previous job in Australia. But when you visit a school in India, you enter a completely different world. Instead of 20 children to a class, there can often be 100 or more.

I remember one classroom where there were two rows of desks, one facing to the right the other to the left. I asked why and was told that two classes had lessons there at the same time. That one image made me realize that we, in the so-called rich countries, really don't have a lot to complain about.

Absolutely. Our principles play an important role in all our business decisions. Because there were serious social and environmental risks, we recently turned down a deal that the local banks were considering supporting.

I also feel our initiatives in the area of financial education are very important. We’ve developed several successful websites to address this issue in India and Australia. A lot of people still don’t know enough about money. It’s time to change that. And as a bank, we can.

For us, certainly not. ING developed its first Business Principles back in 1999. Since when, every five years we review and update them to make sure they remain concise, clear and relevant to current issues and social developments.

For example, in the latest version of the document in which we explain what we mean by the four principles, we focus our attention more than previously on our customers and other stakeholders.

In 2009, the Dutch Banking Association (NVB) developed a Banking Code to restore trust in our sector. ING was naturally an enthusiastic signatory. But we were even more delighted to discover that every area covered in the Moral Ethical Statement of the Dutch Banking Code was already more than fully covered in our own ING Business Principles.

Nevertheless, to be clear, our Top 200 managers, including all Board members, signed the ING Business Principles and the Management Board Banking also signed the Moral Ethical Statement of the Banking Code.

arrow Read more about our Business Principles

arrow Read Hans Hagenaars, ING Retail Board member, on “open & clear”

arrow Read Annerie Vreugdenhil, general manager Corporate Clients Commercial Banking, on “respect”