ING reaction to article in FD on 7 September 2018
7 September 2018
The Dutch newspaper FD on 7 September 2018 published an article about ING’s operations in The Netherlands and Belgium. The article is based on one slide taken from a discussion document used for a regular quarterly meeting of senior management in the Netherlands and Belgium. It is not part of our formal risk reporting.
On the slide, two tables are shown:
- Left hand side: overview of improvement items on our operations which include a risk element. These items have deadlines set by the teams themselves and the organisation tracks regularly the extent to which these deadlines are being met. So these are not ‘incidents’, as the newspaper suggests;
- Right hand side: overview of the scores on various IT risk categories which are being reported monthly. The scores are based on internal metrics and the organisation has set a score target of typically <2.5.
These types of tables are used often in meetings and management presentations to discuss and agree focus areas for the upcoming period, which is customary and ordinary.
The risk update in this presentation was not focused on the issue for which ING announced a settlement agreement earlier, but showed emphasis on a number of risk areas in the bank. The bullet points on the page stressed the importance, and unfortunately overly strong wording was used.