ING Bank takes HR digital

For ING Bank, staying competitive means taking care of the more than 50,000 employees it relies on to deliver outstanding service to the bank’s customers. And that recently meant conducting a massive overhaul of ING’s fragmented human relations (HR) systems.

Founded in 1991 and headquartered in Amsterdam, ING today operates in 45 countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas, where it serves more than 37 million retail and wholesale banking customers. For the most recent fiscal year, ING reported net profits of €4.9 billion (approximately $5.8 billion).

With competition intensifying in the financial services industry, ING leaders realized their company needed to improve the standardization and digitization of its products and services. This, in turn, led them to reevaluate the company’s HR support systems. In many of the countries in which ING operates, the local HR managers had been allowed to select their own HR systems. This empowered the managers but created headaches for central IT, mainly because the number of discrete HR systems had crept up. “In the past, we didn’t always fully integrate the HR systems of our acquisitions,” explains Onno Douma, an ING program manager who helped lead the transformation project, known internally as HR Unite.

When Douma was asked to join the HR systems project in 2015, the plan included:

• Replacing the constellation of HR systems with one core HR system and a set of standard processes
• Allowing localization only where strictly needed
• Creating a platform for easier integration with the internet and the cloud
• Outsourcing some administrative tasks, thereby freeing HR staff to work on higher-value-adding activities

Working with Workday

ING leaders then made two important decisions. One, the bank’s new human capital management (HCM) system would be based on Workday, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) system for HR, workforce planning, recruiting and talent management. And two, ING would begin by implementing Workday in the bank’s home market of the Netherlands. “That implementation would be our global foundation,” Douma explains. “We could then put local processes on top.”

For help, ING turned to DXC Technology (then HPE). DXC offered ING a wealth of experience with Workday. Since 2014, DXC has deployed Workday for more than 600,000 client employees in over 100 countries, as well as for its own 150,000 global employees.

DXC also offers Workday-related services, including Accelerated for Workday, a fixed-price, preconfigured deployment service designed to speed and ease Workday implementations. “It was important for ING that they worked with a partner they could trust, and that had the right experience and knowledge,” says Laurens Karg, a DXC application services executive who worked closely with Douma and his team.

Dual Launches

The first HR-management project at ING was known as PolaHRis (pronounced “Polaris”). It was designed to simplify and unify ING’s HR processes in the Netherlands, then configure these optimized HR processes into Workday. At the same time, PolaHRis would transform the bank’s HR landscape by migrating the bank from its legacy on-premises system to a cloud-based SaaS solution.

ING and DXC began developing PolaHRis in early 2015, and despite the project’s size and complexity, the work went smoothly. By late 2016, the massive system had been deployed to all of the bank’s full-time employees in the Netherlands. “Everyone knew beforehand that it would not be an easy project,” Douma recounts. “But DXC really delivered.”

Pleased with the results of PolaHRis, ING next moved to roll out Workday on a global basis. ING also elected to continue working with DXC, based on the success of the initial rollout. Their work began in early 2017, approximately half a year after PolaHRis was deployed, with ING and DXC embarking on a second HR automation project. This involved implementing Workday in France, where the bank has some 600 full-time employees.

The implementation of Workday at ING France was developed and integrated by a DXC team of professionals working from France, Belgium, Netherlands and Poland. The system went live in late 2017, providing ING France with four Workday components: HCM, benefits, compensation and recruitment. The global rollout also adds functionality for ING’s worldwide recruitment efforts.

Although the two HR systems are still relatively new, the results have been impressive. For one, ING’s HR processes have been simplified and standardized. This allows the bank’s HR professionals to give up some administrative tasks and take on other activities that add more value. ING has also dramatically improved the employee user experience with new features that include mobile access to digital HR transactions, giving the staff more time to serve their customers.