ING to increase focus on decarbonisation in lending

In February of this year, non-major lender ING Australia announced it had appointed a head of home loans – a new position created to lead the merged home loans and third-party distribution businesses.

George Thompson, who was previously the tribe lead for consumer lending and wealth (and had previously been the tribe lead for everyday banking at ING), caught up with Mortgage Business just six weeks after starting his new role.

Reviewing his first few weeks as head of home loans, Thompson revealed that his key areas of focus for the home loans division included policy review, environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, and the modernisation of processes.

Thompson said: “ESG is of critical importance to us, not just within the Australian landscape, but also from a global standpoint. ING has been the market leader from the wholesale space and now we’re looking through the retail banking lens through each of our retail units.

“I think it’s actually through our mortgage business, that we’re going to make a difference there. So that is about how we support customers [to] reduce the emissions that are ultimately coming through their households, and this concept of the decarbonisation of the economy at large.”

Indeed, the Australian government has a net 2030 emissions target of a 43 per cent reduction below 2005 levels and aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

“So, it’s a space that we’re actively looking at and hopefully we’ll be able to share more soon,” he said.

Other key priorities for the bank include modernising the bank’s processes and policies, he said, both for those internally and for its mortgage broker partners (who write 90 per cent of ING home loans).

“We’ve been thinking about how we make it easier for brokers to do business with ING and some of the things that we can be getting on with,” he told Mortgage Business.

He revealed that initial feedback had shown that while brokers “want to write more business with ING”, it was up to the bank to now work through its risk appetites and lending segments to identify whether there are any areas in which it may be “under-represented”.

“ING writes over 90 per cent of its business through the broker channel. Brokers are the most critical source and important avenue of growth to us and continuing to drive growth through the broker channel remains front and center to our strategy. Everything that we do – and will be doing – is centred around how to make lives easier for our brokers,” Thompson said.

“We have the number one NPS in the country among banks and we have a clear, simple, compelling proposition. The three products that we have [home loans] have relatively simplistic policies and processes, and we’re really in the business of looking to make life easier for customers and provide good, fair value for money.

“A key priority will be continuing to review policies through the course of the year with which, hopefully, we will have more to share directly with you in due course, as the year progresses.”

[Related: ING lifts investment loan LVR]