ING bank in wholesale push with new head to lead expansion and diversification strategy

ING bank CEO Melanie Evans has appointed Andrew Hector to lead an expansion, diversification strategy to grow the European lenders’ Wholesale bank.

ING head of wholesale banking Andrew Hector and chief executive Melanie Evans. Picture: Jane Dempster

Netherlands-based lender ING’s wholesale bank head Andrew Hector plans to offer merger and acquisition services to its domestic customers.

Mr Hector said ING would bring to market specific niche financial products the bank offered overseas, including deal contingent hedging and margin lending, to support mergers and activity through capital and risk management.

“By and large, it will involve the deployment of a sustainable amount of capital to get a position within a banking group and then look to play to our strengths from there as to how we build out a broader relationship,” he said.

ING expects private equity players to target listed real estate investments, which have been heavily sold down.

“We’ve got a really strong position in acquisition finance in Australia,” he said. “I would say we’ll be looking cautiously.”

The former ANZ executive said he wanted the wholesale bank to grow its customer base and start doing more with the big businesses it already banks.

These included Acciona, Goodman and Rail First, among more than 100 clients.

“We’ve probably got 12 customers I would say that are realistic new prospects,” Mr Hector said.

Mr Hector said the wholesale bank had a “really good mix” of customers, split almost equally three ways between domestic customers, Australia-based companies offshore and offshore-based customers dealing with the Australian market.

This has seen ING bring in a head of sustainable finance, new people into the financial markets business and securitisation program, taking staff numbers to 45.

“We can selectively grow so we’re not here to try and take on the majors. Obviously we’ve got to play to our strength,” Mr Hector said.

ING was in a position to double the size of the wholesale bank over the next “couple of years”.

“Obviously, the world’s a bit of a tricky place on a few fronts at the moment, so we will continue to be very disciplined with what we’re doing and manage our risk-weighted assets appropriately,” he said.

Mr Hector said he was also looking to grow ING’s sustainable financing area, which has already written $2.5bn in green loans.

ING moved to cut financing for new coal assets and is set to run its coal exposure to zero by 2025. The bank has provided no funding to new greenfield oil or gas projects in Australia since December 2021.

ING chief executive Melanie Evans, who took over the bank in November 2020, said growing the wholesale bank would give greater diversity to funding streams.

“We’re now at a scale where it makes sense to actually create those roles here in Australia, as opposed to accessing product experts or sector experts either in Singapore, the US or in Europe,” she said.

“But in the event that our customers need global reach or a global solution, we can easily find that in the more than 40 countries that we’re in across the globe.”