ING Bank is ramping up its shared services business in the Philippines to support the rapid absorption of processing services across its wholesale banking operations in Asia and in Europe.
The Netherlands-based global financial giant’s ING Business Shared Services Inc. is moving to a new and bigger office location this June to accommodate more in-house processing from ING.
ING’s global shared services Center in Manila has managed to double its staff count from 250 in 2015. It 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 on a Philippine Economic Zone Authority-registered information-technology (IT) park in Bonifacio Global City, Taguig City.
“The office expansion demonstrates our stronger commitment to the Philippine BPO [business-process outsourcing] sector,” which is expected to earn close to $40 billion and employ 2 million workers by 2020, said Cees Ovelgonne, the head of ING’s shared services center in the country.
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 following year, the GSO started serving the needs of ING globally, specifically for financial markets, trade finance services and lending services. In November 2016 the GSO was renamed ING Business Shared Services to align with ING’s other shared services center in Slovakia and IT centers in Romania and Poland.
“This expansion is a significant move to further harmonize services and shared technology throughout the bank, ultimately enhancing ING clients’ experiences globally,” ING’s global COO and Chief Transformation Officer Roel Louwhoff said. “I am very proud of the experience we’ve built in the past years at our Manila shared services center in delivering the highest quality of service and look forward to leveraging our success and expertise across the various ING business lines and across all time zones.”
In addition to financial markets, trade finance services, lending services and client due diligence/onboarding activities, 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.
“ING Bank has been in the Philippines for more than a quarter of a century now. Our decision to expand our presence in this country is a testament to Filipino professionals’ world-class service and significant contribution to ING’s operational excellence,” Mr. Ovelgonne said.
In 2016 ING was named “Global Bank of the Year” by Financial Times’s The Banker, and awarded “Best Bank of the Year 2016” in the Netherlands, Belgium and Western Europe. In the Philippines, ING Bank, N.V., Manila Branch is consistently ranked at the annual PDS Annual Awards for being among the Top 5 Corporate Issue Managers/Arrangers in the Philippine financial markets. It was again named the “Best Fixed Income House” by the Fund Managers Association of the Philippines, an award that it has bagged consistently for the past 14 years.