Voice-over: This is Leaders in Finance, a podcast where we find out more about the people behind a successful career. We speak with the leaders of today and tomorrow to discuss their motivations, their organizations and their personal lives. Why? Because the financial sector could use a little more honest conversation. Your host is Jeroen Broekema.
Jeroen: Welcome, listeners, to a new episode of the Leaders in Finance podcast. Thank you for tuning in. This week, we are joined by Daniele Tonella, Chief Technology Officer and member of the Management Board Banking at ING. Welcome, Daniele.
Daniele: Hello.
Jeroen: Wonderful. We’re here. I say ‘here’ because I’m at your offices, so thanks for having me. Before we begin, I would like to thank the partners of the podcast for their ongoing support. They are EY, the global consulting firm, Mogelijk Vastgoedfinancieringen, Lepaya and Duna. Many thanks to them.
As always, I will start by spelling the name of my guest. Daniele is D-A-N-I-E-L-E and Tonella is T-O-N-E-L-L-A. Daniele Tonella is Chief Technology Officer and member of the Management Board Banking at ING. As I said before, since August 2024, he has been responsible for ING’s global technology landscape and advises the Management Board on technology-driven business opportunities. As he puts it, his role covers almost everything at ING that contains, quote, “a chip or a line of code.” He leads a global technology organization of around 20,000 people. His responsibilities include the reliability and security of ING’s systems, engineering productivity, the transition to scalable global technology platforms and cloud-native architecture, and innovation in areas such as artificial intelligence.
Before joining ING, Daniele was Group Chief Information Officer at UniCredit and CEO of UniCredit Services. Earlier in his career, he led AXA Technology Services, served as Global CIO at Evalueserve, held technology and operations leadership roles at Swiss Life and began his career in consulting at Mercer Management Consulting, as well as at McKinsey & Company. Daniele grew up in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland and studied engineering at ETH Zurich. He later completed executive education programs at Harvard, IMD, INSEAD and MIT Sloan. Finally, Daniele is 54, he’s married, lives in Switzerland and has four children.
That’s quite a lot already, Daniele, about you. But just to start, there are so many directions I’d like to go in this conversation. First of all, I read something really interesting. I think you were only 10 years old when you started coding. Is that right?
Daniele: Yeah, exactly. I had a primary class and I had a colleague by my side, and he happened to have a Texas TI-99/4A, which was a computer at the end of the day. And so we were meeting in the evening and coding things. We were designing an image one pixel at a time because we couldn’t do better. So this is how it all started, yeah.
Jeroen: What did you like about it the very first time you were doing this?
Daniele: Yeah, this element of imagining something and then writing a recipe that makes it happen. So there is a gigantic element of creativity in that. You imagine something and it becomes an expression of your imagination.
Jeroen: And when you were that age, did you already know: I want to work with tech in the future?
Daniele: Well, not in the tech sense, but yes, I definitely knew I wanted to work in something that smelled like engineering, right? So build things, understand how things work, make things happen, right? I could probably not formalize it and say, well, this is computer science or mechanical engineering, but it was definitely: do something that works.
Jeroen: Was this something that your parents also stimulated? Were they also excited about tech, or was this something really purely coming out of you?
Daniele: They did not stimulate it explicitly, but yes, my grandfather was an engineer. My uncle is a professor of engineering. My father was a doctor. So, in a way, that concept of imagining and making things happen was part of the everyday life I was in.
Jeroen: In my preparation for this conversation, I also read that you are, in a way, a technology optimist, but not a technology romantic. It’s a quote from you, right?
Daniele: It’s very possible. I say many things.
Jeroen: But what do you mean by it?
Daniele: Yeah, look, there is a mythology around technology, in the sense that technology can do everything and enables everything. But there is a lot of marketing pressure behind that statement. I’m way more realistic, right? Of course, ancient Rome was a spectacular technology shop. If you look at Roman roads that are still there now, that is more the expression of technology I have in mind, right? It’s something that is made to solve problems for humanity and, in some cases, even outlast humanity itself. So that’s not an ideological view of what technology is and how valuable it is for the immediate. It’s just: you do what you can for humanity, and that happens to remain.
Jeroen: What does the romantic part mean here?
Daniele: Romantic in the sense of falling in love with technology for the sake of technology. There is no higher purpose in itself, right? It is just a tool for us to improve the way we do things. Nothing else.
Jeroen: You’ve been in this job for about two years now, approximately—at the beginning of August, if I’m not mistaken. Two weeks from now, when we’re recording this. How were the last two years? A very broad question.
Daniele: Look, they were thrilling. It felt like they went by in a snap and, at the same time, they felt like 10 years because of the speed, the density, the type of people, the quality of people, the world we are in and the technologies that are emerging. So it’s a constant stream of high-speed stimuli and, at the same time, an expectation to lay foundations for a sustainable evolution for the practice now in the bank and for the bank itself.
Jeroen: Was it, or is it, the toughest job you’ve ever done so far?
Daniele: Very hard to tell. In some aspects, it’s probably the easiest one because of the experience I have, which helps me read situations in a different way, and because of the culture of the company. ING has a spectacular culture, and that makes working together easier. Tougher because of the dimension, tougher because of the level of speed we face, tougher because the world is different than it was 10 years ago. In that sense, I absolutely cannot say tougher or easier. There are elements that make it easier and then there are elements that are more complicated.
Jeroen: And in your job, how important is it that you are a good manager? How important is it that you actually know a lot about tech yourself? Like, is this job ultimately a managerial role, a strategic role, or is it really the content role that is most important now? Because you have 20,000 people. That’s a lot of people.
Daniele: Yeah. So I don’t code, right, if that is the question. Not anymore. At the same time, exactly because the organization is that large, the words I say and the things I do can be listened to either because of authority—because, you know, the CTO says so, so you have to—or because of credibility, because people believe that you know what you’re talking about and so they listen to you in a different way.
I try to go that route because I believe that if you know what the technical issues are and what challenges people face day to day, not only can you take better decisions, but you are way more credible and the organization will listen to you more than if you just go there with a PowerPoint and two indicators and say, you know, you need to reach 22 or 42 by the end of the year. Go and run. So that is easy. It’s a bit of a challenge for engineers, right? Engineering is a discipline of credibility. So if you don’t bring the table stakes of what you’re talking about, the level of acceptance is a bit more viscous.
Jeroen: This podcast is called Leaders in Finance. What would you say is your kind of leadership style? We should ask other people, but if you had to describe yourself?
Daniele: Yeah, I’m extremely curious. I want to understand how things work. I like simplifications a lot. I think part of the challenge of any tech leader, especially in finance, because of the size of the tech shop, is to manage complexity in the long run. I like clockwork. So I like the orchestrated functioning of a team. I like strong teams. I like to trust, delegate and empower the organization to act. And I really like meeting surprising people. If there is one thing I adore, it’s seeing how many smart people we have in an organization like ours and how surprising they can be, either in the things they do or in the things they do that you are not even aware of.
Jeroen: How do you stay up to date yourself? What’s your way of learning? Because things are changing so extremely quickly. I mean, in my preparation, I’ve seen that you’ve talked a lot about AI. Obviously, we will probably do that as well during this conversation. How do you stay on top of your game content-wise? Are there particular sources you use, or does everything come out of the organization?
Daniele: Well, I read a hell of a lot. My morning routine is that I wake up very early and then I read.
Jeroen: What do you read?
Daniele: Well, I read a number of blogs. I read a number of obscure news outlets. I don’t know if I can name them, but there are a number of places that have very interesting news with a bit less marketing and more engineering content. That’s very, very valuable. I don’t listen a lot. I’m ashamed to say that on a podcast, but I’m not a big—
Jeroen: People will listen to you.
Daniele: Well, people who are attuned to the channel, exactly. I probably should write for the others, simply because I get more information per unit of time by reading than by listening.
I do things myself. So yes, I do have a little bit of AI stuff at home, just to play with it and feel how it feels. Is it as easy as it looks, or is it more complicated? What are the limits? At least to get a sense. I talk a lot with people, with peers and with people outside the company to try to get other perspectives and see what flies and what doesn’t.
And I have a firm belief that some things do not change, despite all the noise about AI transforming everything. Yes, it’s transforming everything, but some principles remain the same. I mean, some very basic things. Before you deploy a piece of software or an agent, you test it. You confirm it does what it is intended to do. Does that change with AI? It does not. It may change the way you do it, but the fact that you have to do it remains exactly the same. Do you have to think about what you want to develop before you start coding? Well, that remains exactly the same. Or the balance between speed and sustainability, right? Can I have a quick prototype now, then another prototype tomorrow and then yet another one? Yes, of course I can. But then I end up with a pile of prototypes and no scalability. So these principles remain exactly the same. The challenge is more to learn which elements of the principles are evolving and what part of the emerging technology fits into which part of this historical body of doing technology, this historical way of doing technology.
Jeroen: A couple of follow-up questions, because you say a lot of really interesting things. One on the personal side: when you play around with AI a little bit at home, what is it you do? Do you build your own agent, or do you just try things? Can you be more specific?
Daniele: Yeah, well, I can give you one or two examples. One example is that, for years, every letter I get from the bank, the insurance company or whatever, I scan, right? So then I have folders full of scans, and they are scanned with a stupid name, right? ‘Scanned’ and then whatever the date is. But my sorting order for the file name is the date of the letter, then the sender and then maybe a comment on what it is. I used to spend some time sitting in front of the screen and just renaming files.
Okay, now I took an IDE. I don’t want to name names, but I took one of the notorious ones. And with AI, I developed a local application that opens a folder where I have all my files, takes a file and sends it to a local LLM with OCR in it. So it’s a model tuned for OCR. It reads the content, interprets the date of the letter I received and who the sender was, renames the file and moves on to the next one, right? It sounds stupid, and it is probably stupid, but it solved the problem of having to sit there every couple of weeks and say: I still need to rename these.
Jeroen: And now you’re experiencing for yourself how easy or difficult it is to build.
Daniele: Well, you start. So yes, but you also start appreciating the value of good software, because getting the basic functionality was easy. But then you start encountering all the error conditions: the folder is not the right one, it does not have a PDF inside, whatever, whatever. And then you learn that developing proper software is more complicated than just expressing, “I would like to do this and that. You know, just do it for me.” That’s great.
Jeroen: When I try to envision myself doing your job, one of the things I would find extremely difficult is distinguishing between what is hype and what is something we really want to use here at ING. How do you do that? Because there’s so much out there. Things are going really fast. Some things will actually change everything, and a lot of things, I assume, are just here for a few months and then gone again.
Daniele: Yep, yep. Well, the first criterion is: who is making the statement? Right? Because you can have somebody who represents an enterprise, where you can assume that the statement contains a fair degree of conflict, right? Because their interest is to sell you something, so they will hype it more than it is. Or somebody may make a statement, but I question their technical competence and depth. And so I know that statement is more of a generic directional statement, which might have merit if it is necessary to read a situation or learn about how, you know, institutions are thinking. That’s perfectly okay.
But then there is the feedback you get from people you trust because you know how they see the world, you know that they have been doing things and you know that they have a balanced view. Then you can trust the statement. So I would say the real curation of statements lies in the credibility of the person making the comment.
Jeroen: And then, ultimately, you still need to decide what you’re going to do first, because you have 20,000 people, you have this strategy that’s set out by your fellow board members and the Executive Board, and then there are a lot of things you’re not going to do, I guess. So what’s your way of setting priorities, in other words?
Daniele: Yeah, well, the first thought is: don’t believe that, in an organization of 20,000 people, it’s me who tells everybody what to do, right? There are a lot of dynamics that happen without me knowing about them. And that’s good. So my role is more about giving the general direction, giving the priorities, defining what is in and what should not be in, and sanctioning what really cannot be in, right? Because there is a grey area where you naturally have to tolerate divergences. But then there are a few points where there is no negotiation, right? And those red lines are more important.
Jeroen: Can you give an example in this space?
Daniele: About a year ago, we had plenty of consultants coming in, all of them with spectacular AI ideas. And each of them had their own agentic framework, so an architecture for how to do it. Now, the problem is that the architectures themselves were all more or less the same, but with different products inside. So, for us, the risk scenario was ending up with gigantic fragmentation in our agentic landscape, because every project would have built its own architecture.
Then we drew a line. We said, you know, there is one agentic framework. It’s ours, and it looks like this. If you bring something that is not there, we can add it. Otherwise, we just stick to this one. So giving boundaries to the organization is the way to ensure that we move consistently, while leaving freedom to the people on the ground, on the front lines, because they know what they really need. So the balance between freedom and control is a main part of my role.
Jeroen: And really setting the boundaries is like raising kids.
Daniele: In a way, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. In a way, because with kids, you cannot prevent them from injuring themselves, but you just have to prevent them from killing themselves, right?
Jeroen: So those are the hard boundaries.
Daniele: Exactly. There are elements where you really should not allow people to go beyond the boundaries. And then there are elements where you really need to push for independence, drive and independent thinking, which is, by the way, one of the big, beautiful elements at ING. We have a culture where my challenge is more to convey energy than to instil energy. It’s a good problem to have, right? Because instilling energy is frustrating, at least to me. But focusing and conveying energy—and sorry, focusing and channeling energy is the right verb—that’s way, way, way more interesting.
Jeroen: Yeah, because in multiple interviews, you’ve said that there’s quite an entrepreneurial spirit at ING, right? So I can imagine that within these 20,000 people, there are groups or maybe individuals who can come up with all kinds of solutions and all kinds of ideas. So you want to channel that in a way, but you also want to maintain that innovative power. On the other hand, you want to set the boundaries, as you mentioned earlier. It’s quite a task, right?
Daniele: Well, it is. And I make it even worse, right? Worse—or more, I would say. More intense. ING went fully agile many years ago. And if I look at it from a tech perspective, that meant that every squad—and we have 3,000 of them—is used to a sort of full-stack engineering logic, right? So from infrastructure to operations, you cover everything. That led to a lot of freedom, which has advantages. But then, when you reach that scale, you start getting friction and the agility is less than it should be.
What is the deal now? What freedoms am I taking away as a counterpart to still allowing you to be independent and agile in your way of doing things? And that’s exactly the discussion with AI today. So what instruments can you use to invent things on your own? And where does it start to become enterprise IT, where there’s a platform, there is governance, there are rules, there are…
Jeroen: Yeah, because you’re in many countries. Let’s say that, in a country far away, they come up with an idea.
Daniele: Yeah.
Jeroen: They actually start to launch it. I guess there are some rules governing when you can start launching it. But, on a very positive note, it could also be something that should actually be used by the entire group.
Daniele: Fantastic. But that is one of the very hot topics. I mean, we have a strategy of scalable tech and a scalable bank, which means that, for a specific problem, we don’t want to have 20 ideas. We want to have one or maybe two. We want to converge.
And now, how do we maintain that talent spirit, that talent quality and the entrepreneurial spirit in the organization while channeling them into a few concentrated, global assets? How do we separate assets from people? That’s the real challenge. It’s the human challenge of helping everyone detach a little bit from their own products, ideas and technologies to focus on the global ones. They are still central, valuable contributors throughout the long journey, but their contribution happens on a higher scale than just their small local asset. And in AI times, that’s fundamental.
Jeroen: One thing I wanted to ask you to explain to me, because you’ve mentioned the rule “garbage in, garbage out.” You know where I’m going with this. But you’ve also said that, in times of AI, it becomes “garbage in, disaster out.” So is there an exponential effect here?
Daniele: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Jeroen: Why is that? How exactly does it work? Because it sounds so logical. But when I started thinking about it, I thought: do I really understand it? And I don’t think I do.
Daniele: Yeah. So here’s the thing. Imagine there is no AI. You just have people coding, right? You can assume that the engineer who is coding has a mental model of how they are designing the function that fulfils a particular need, right? And the amount of code they can produce is limited by a mix of available time, budgeted time, their own skills and everything else. So you get to a certain number of lines of code. It’s not a productivity indicator, but let’s assume this one.
With AI, you can produce a hell of a lot more code to fulfil the same requirement, but that code does not have a human owner who understands why it was written the way it was written. So it can make it bigger in quantity—not necessarily, but it can—and you have much less knowledge of all the reasoning that went into it. And that’s a recipe for disaster.
Let me give a very practical example. I’ve seen situations where we were transcribing code with an AI system and there was a piece of code that was particularly wrong in a way, right? The function was described in a way that would make an engineer say: “What’s this?” So it was transcribed in a pure way, but then the system was unstable. Why? Because that wrong code had been written by a human who had corrected the code because, in the context in which the application was running, it had to be that imperfect to be stable, right?
So if you automate everything, you assume that the world of code is intrinsically perfect. And that’s not the case. It requires humans to make it stable, perfect, reliable, everything. As of today. In five years, who knows? But as of today, if you just open those gates, you tend to lose a lot of that knowledge.
The other bit is that we tend to reduce coding to: I want to have a function or behaviour on my screen, so to say. Here is the code that does it. But behind that, there is so much you have to consider around security, architecture, performance, scalability and where you deploy it. It’s a long list of non-functional requirements. And if you don’t have that exactly in mind, you get your function, but it’s just a piece of crap. Because the moment you get into production, it causes more damage than just delivering something. So this is where AI has not yet arrived for a large enterprise context at scale. On a small, local scale, it’s spectacular. You can really do things. But the moment you move to a different level of expectations, you know, it’s just different. Today, I would not fly a plane where the operating system was developed by AI. As simple as that.
Jeroen: Yeah. So do you already need people with a different skill set? Are you hiring a lot of different people now?
Daniele: So there is one skill set that is emerging. In the beginning, the traditional engineering and coding skill would have been: you have to code in Java, Erlang or whatever you want. Today, we need many more senior people who are able to design architectures in which the code will then find its place. That’s a catch-22 problem, because how do you become a senior? You become a senior because you do junior work first. Now, if AI is taking away the junior work, where do I get the seniors of tomorrow? Today, my senior architects are all my age, so to say. They’ve seen everything and they can help design.
Jeroen: That’s a great question. But what’s the answer? Because this is the same problem facing the consulting firms you’ve worked for, legal firms and firms everywhere, right? No one has an answer to that. So what are your first thoughts on your own brilliant question?
Daniele: Yeah, I would say the question was more about the problem than… Look, there are a couple of things I believe. The first is that we should not stop hiring juniors, for a couple of reasons. First of all, because if we stop hiring juniors, we are assuming that AI is really going to take away the whole chain, and we don’t know that yet. So we might be making a stupid mistake. Second, if I look at graduates, they have grown up with a very different attitude from the people we have in the organization. So we need them to really sense what works and what doesn’t.
Then there are other experiments that people are doing. I know of a large tech company where they say—at least, they self-declare—that one day a week, they turn off AI assistance for juniors because they have to learn to do things. One thing we asked one of the big model providers was whether they could provide us with a model that goes into junior mode. So if you are a junior, you get your model, but it does not do what you ask it to do, right? You cannot delegate work. You can ask for advice on how to do something and then you get an answer, but you cannot delegate the work. So you are forced to learn how to do things.
I don’t have a complete answer, but I believe that we should keep investing in the next generations and find ways to help them develop the learning muscle necessary to judge what the models are doing today. There is a bit of a belief that the model is taking over everything. But who is going to judge what comes out? I agree that there may be far fewer people than today, but some of them will need to.
Jeroen: Well, as long as you keep hiring juniors, that’s good news. One other topic before we move to you personally. Nowadays, a lot of people talk about what you do yourself as an organization and what you outsource. But also: what are the things for which you want to depend on others, and what are the things for which you don’t? Whether it’s cloud services or outsourcing things to countries that may not be as stable anymore as we thought they were, et cetera. So how do you make these decisions? In other words, what are the important things that you really want ING to control directly and on its own?
Daniele: Well, the discussion is a relatively fresh one, especially when it relates to the public cloud. If you take the discussion about sovereignty, which is more intense in some countries and regions than in others, that discussion has evolved. It started many years ago with the question: where is the data centre? Does it have to be in my country? Then it moved on to: who has access to my data? So we moved into data protection as a sovereignty category. And now we are talking about survivability: who can shut down the service and essentially kill me?
That discussion is much more complicated because we have delegated innovation—more than development, really, innovation—to a few very large players. And they were extremely successful at it. Now the trade-off is: do I keep innovating quickly because I can consume very sophisticated services, or do I accept going more slowly because I have to build everything myself in-house?
At the macro level, it is easy. The real question is hyperscalers versus everything else. When people say ‘cloud’, they often think: yeah, these are servers. That part is trivial. What becomes more sophisticated are the platform components, right? When you move into AI models, it’s more than the models. It’s the harness around the models. Models come and go, but the whole orchestration layer around them is an asset. Developing everything in-house may not be a wise choice if you want to move quickly. So that choice—speed versus freedom, so to say—is a real compromise.
Jeroen: Yeah, it’s a difficult one, because everybody talks about resilience, and there are good reasons for that nowadays. I mean, would we have thought five years ago that we would be worried about having our data in the US, for example? Probably not many of us.
Daniele: Yeah. Having the data there, or having the risk that any country from which you receive the service turns off, you know, an identity and access management system. But ultimately, you’re dependent on thousands of external dependencies, right? We are, as an industry, where the car-manufacturing industry went after just-in-time, Kanban and Kaizen: the supply chain is so just-in-time, global and fragmented that a fire at a factory in Japan producing seats stops production at a car manufacturer in Germany, right?
So that level of independence—or dependency—is just gigantic. And it’s not even a question of ING or banking per se. It’s everything. I mean, it’s global. Imagine your mobile telecommunications go down tomorrow. Well, half of the world you see outside on the street depends on that. So we are simply a heavily interconnected society. And this is not something we can escape through declarations or even small investments.
Jeroen: No, it’s kind of strange, right? On the one hand, we’re more dependent on one another globally than ever before. We’re also, you know, more hostile, I would say, than probably ever before.
This is the Leaders in Finance podcast with Jeroen Broekema.
A bit of a hard turn to you personally: can you share a little bit about how you grew up?
Daniele: Yeah. So I was born in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. I spent the first six years there, then from six to 18 in the Italian-speaking part and then from 18 until I was forty-something in the German-speaking part again. I was the first of four boys. My father was a paediatrician and, in general, we were a very grounded family, let’s put it that way, right? He also used to work with his hands.
Jeroen: So what does ‘grounded’ mean?
Daniele: Yeah, being a bit allergic to ultra-fancy things. My grandfather had his own vineyard after retiring. Working with your hands has value. In my house, I always had—I don’t know how to translate it into English—a room for working with your hands, right? A place where you have the drill, saws and God knows what. That room was a place where the family did things. So, in that sense, not ethereal, but very grounded and connected to…
Jeroen: Do you still do that yourself today, doing things with your hands at home?
Daniele: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeroen: Apart from, you know, building this little…
Daniele: Not just that, you know. Yeah, absolutely. I have a small workshop for woodworking. And you can look up something called tensegrity, which is a type of structure. I built a couple of cabinets using this design.
Jeroen: Anyway, it’s like building. That’s something that also comes back in your work, right?
Daniele: I like building, building, building, building.
Jeroen: Did you ever build your own house as well?
Daniele: Well, no, but I renovated one. Yes, I did.
Jeroen: Yeah, there you go. And so, four boys. What did that mean for the atmosphere at home?
Daniele: I have fantastic memories. Of course, being the first or the eldest, you tend to have, either explicitly or implicitly, a lot of expectations placed on you to be the responsible one, right? Because you are the example for the horde. And that drives you a little bit, right? So I was the quiet one. I was the reflective one. I was the good example, right?
Jeroen: So the serious one?
Daniele: The serious one, definitely. Yeah.
Jeroen: Are all four boys engineers now?
Daniele: No, no. There is an architect, a doctor and a lawyer. So no, it’s everything. We’ve got the full programme.
Jeroen: Yes, absolutely. You could start a business.
Daniele: Exactly.
Jeroen: That’s great. You said your dad was a paediatrician.
Daniele: Yeah.
Jeroen: And your mum?
Daniele: She almost completed her pharmacy studies, but then I came along. Yeah, I broke her plans.
Jeroen: And you mentioned the German-speaking part and the Italian-speaking part. So you speak a lot of languages. French as well, I guess?
Daniele: Yeah. French, Italian, English and German.
Jeroen: And Dutch nowadays, I guess.
Daniele: Well, I understand it slightly, but I’m far from speaking it. But Swiss German, and then an Italian dialect on top of that.
Jeroen: Oh, wow. That’s a lot. And Romansh as well?
Daniele: No, no, no. Romansh is a Latin language. I don’t speak it. I speak Swiss German. It’s a German dialect. If you mix languages, Dutch is like Swiss German and English, more than German and English. So it’s German we speak.
Jeroen: I see. So knowing German probably helps you in the Netherlands.
Daniele: Yeah, a little bit. Yeah.
Jeroen: So the stereotype about Switzerland is that people are very used to working with different cultures. They’re quite globally focused. Is that true, in your view?
Daniele: Totally. Yeah. I mean, when I grew up in the Italian-speaking part, there was no university at the time. So we were forced to move to either the German-speaking part or the French-speaking part. And then, yes, you are Swiss, but you’re in a different cultural space, in a language that you don’t understand in the beginning. So the pressure to fit in and learn the local culture is gigantic.
Plus, Swiss kids go into the army, and the army usually moves people around and mixes them together. So you always end up with people from different cultural spaces. In that case, they are united by being Swiss, but they happen to come from different cultures.
Jeroen: So the army is actually a unifying place, in a way.
Daniele: In a way, it moves people around. Yeah. It moves them around and brings them together. My son learned French in the army.
Jeroen: So you still live in Switzerland.
Daniele: Yeah.
Jeroen: I guess you commute quite a lot to Amsterdam. How different is this place culturally from where you’re from?
Daniele: Well, I’m hesitating, because where I’m from can be very different, right? The southern part is culturally more Italian than the German-speaking part. I adore being in the Netherlands because of this gigantic can-do spirit. People are very practical. The degree of political games is much lower than in other places, because what counts here is doing things, right? So if you are slow, if you don’t act, you get a lot of pressure. Then, if you are hyperactive because you are in Brownian motion—doing things in all directions—but you’re not delivering anything…
In the Netherlands, it is slightly different. Switzerland perhaps has a slightly less direct culture. In Switzerland, there is still a little more interest in structure and form. Here, it is really: go fast, and then we’ll think about structure. So don’t waste too much time. I’m exaggerating, of course, but given the choice between speed and structure, speed wins here. In Switzerland, structure wins.
Jeroen: That’s interesting. What else was important in your—as you said, from zero to six? I mean, I would say from zero to 18. What were important moments in your youth?
Daniele: Well, I had this uncle who was a professor in Venezuela for a number of reasons. Imagine having an uncle who comes home every three years. So you get this man with a beard who is part of your family, but you don’t really know him, with no children and a very adventurous life. He came back with very exotic things. I mean, he came with a Commodore SX-64, the portable Commodore 64, because it had just come out.
So he brought in this outside view, this almost nomadic spirit, right? He had seen different things, different ways of thinking and different people. So it was really an opening to the world. And he had all these cool gadgets. At that age, one of the things that influenced me, so to say, was a book on Modula-2, which is probably a long-dead language. But it was the first serious language that I started getting close to. I was at an age where—
Jeroen: How old were you, approximately?
Daniele: I was probably 13. Yeah, maybe a bit older—14—because I remember that my father gave me the choice of either getting a computer or a motorbike, and I chose a computer. Well, don’t judge me. It was an 8086-compatible computer, not an original because that was too expensive. I started coding in Modula-2 first and then Pascal afterwards. And then it moved on.
Jeroen: So he was important as an example. Did you speak a lot with this uncle when he came home?
Daniele: Yes. It was the time before email, right? Intercontinental phone calls were, you know, a couple of euros per minute, so you didn’t do that. Then he started teaching in Europe, and from then on, I intensified the conversation, I would say. He was not a mentor in the sense of permanently accompanying my thinking. He was more of an inspiration because of the things he highlighted when he was here.
Jeroen: In other words, he taught you to think bigger, probably?
Daniele: To think differently. Differently, yeah, more than bigger. Really differently, because he always had a very interesting perspective on things.
Jeroen: Were there other things between zero and 18 that really shaped you or made you the person you are today?
Daniele: I mean, school-wise, at that time, when I went to high school, you had five different types. There was the classical one, where you had to learn Greek and Latin; a literary one, where you had Latin and a bit of mathematics; a scientific one; and a couple of others. I chose the one with Latin, which was a bit weird in a way, because people who thought like me immediately went in the scientific direction, whereas I chose a literary one.
In hindsight, that gave me a sort of affinity with language, because Latin forces you to cut language into all shapes and look at it from different perspectives. That is something I later learned to see as an asset. Today, if you think of a role like mine, language is the main instrument. Being sufficiently eloquent is an instrument in the work of any manager, because you need to be able to convey and structure a message. You need to be able to find words that sometimes also relate to emotions and help people visualize what you want to say, so you can have a message that stays.
Jeroen: Well, you put that very eloquently. And it reminds me of Steve Jobs, who said that later in life, you connect the dots. At the time, you probably didn’t know what you would use it for. But now, when you look back, you actually connect the dots to what you’re using it for today.
Daniele: Well, I definitely know that I hated Latin and was not particularly good at it either. The other thing is, yes, with age, you start connecting the dots. There is, of course, a good degree of speculation in that. Today, I read it like this. Maybe it’s not true. Maybe it’s just a plausible explanation, but there is no correlation.
Jeroen: Yeah, but still, it’s likely that it did something, right? I guess.
Daniele: Yeah.
Jeroen: Why did you decide to go to ETH Zurich?
Daniele: Well, ETH is a polytechnical school, so this is where engineers are trained in Switzerland. My choice of higher education was driven by exclusions first. So I knew: no literature, nothing non-scientific. I wanted to study physics, but at that time, I thought that with physics, you could only become a teacher. I didn’t want to be a teacher. In hindsight, physics would have been a key that opened the door to so many things.
In the arrogance of youth, I felt: well, I know information systems because I was coding in three, four or five languages, whatever they were. So I went into mechanical engineering because, going back to my brothers, we were Lego kings. We had piles of Lego, Lego Technic, and we were building things all the time. So I felt that mechanical engineering sounded like something I could relate to.
After a couple of years, I realized, first of all, that I didn’t really know computer science, because coding is not yet computer science, right? It’s just a subset. The second thing I learned was that I preferred computer science to mechanical engineering. But I decided to finish, so I moved into industrial engineering and got my diploma that way—or my master’s, although it was called something different at the time. And then I went into consulting.
Jeroen: Yeah, we’ll ask you about that in a second. I cannot resist asking you about Lego. Do you still like it today?
Daniele: No.
Jeroen: Did your children like it as well?
Daniele: No, not at all. But it has also become something very different. At that time, the whole idea was that you had parts and then infinite possibilities. The closest thing I’ve seen my children do was Minecraft, which, in a way, is like Lego because the parts are very simple and then you can unleash your creativity. It’s virtual, but the logic is the same.
If you look at these types of products today, they have taken a different shape. Your creativity seems to be less of the focus. It’s more about getting the Interceptor, getting the bunch of flowers or getting the car. But it’s not what it was, right?
Jeroen: Yeah, it’s the creativity, the building part that’s—
Daniele: Yeah, exactly. Completely. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Jeroen: That has become very clear from this conversation: building is important. Building, building, building.
Daniele: Building is important, yeah.
Jeroen: That’s great. Anyway, what kind of student were you? Were you very serious, like the eldest child?
Daniele: Very bad. No, very bad.
Jeroen: Very bad?
Daniele: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeroen: What does that mean?
Daniele: Yeah, I struggled heavily at the beginning of studying at ETH because I couldn’t live with the discipline of having to hand in four or five series of exercises every week. So I was permanently running behind. Then, when summer came, I had to prepare for the exams. I thought: let me start learning all the theory to get ready for the exams.
It did not end well, because what I learned afterwards was that, at least at ETH at that time—maybe today it’s different—it was more important to be able to solve problems than to know all the theory behind them, right? So then I learned that I just had to repeat the exercises 1,000 times. At the end of the day, you get a system of partial differential equations. You don’t know how it works or why it is like this, but you know how to solve it. So that was the pragmatic thing.
Jeroen: But was the reason you weren’t working that hard on it that you didn’t like the way you were learning, or were you simply busy partying or doing other things?
Daniele: Not partying, but my mind was definitely flying over plenty of other things instead of getting myself to sit there and just, one step at a time, go on and move forward. So I probably carried this infinite curiosity with me, which is a superpower in a way, but at the same time can be a hurdle when you’re left to yourself with a very strict plan to deliver.
Jeroen: Why did you go into strategy consulting? Because that was your first job, right? Consulting.
Daniele: For lack of a better idea.
Jeroen: Well, you’re so creative in your thinking, so…
Daniele: Well, in a way, yes, because it promised that I could learn a lot about very different industries without having to commit to any of them first. So it had a promise. By the way, this is also how I went back into tech, because the first project was process redesign and had nothing to do with tech. But then McKinsey had just opened a Business Technology Office and they were looking for people, so I ended up going back into tech.
Jeroen: This was still in Switzerland, right? Or was this abroad?
Daniele: I was hired in Switzerland, but my first project was in the Netherlands, by the way. Yeah, I was in Den Bosch.
Jeroen: But not in financial services?
Daniele: No.
Jeroen: During your consulting jobs, did you work for the financial industry?
Daniele: No. I worked for railways, ports and energy companies—everything except the financial sector.
Jeroen: Did you think you would ever go into financial services?
Daniele: No, no. Absolutely not.
Jeroen: Do you know much about it now?
Daniele: What I knew was that I wanted to work somewhere with a lot of technology and information systems. And the financial industry is the place to be.
Jeroen: Well, you have a lot. It’s the place to be in terms of data, right?
Daniele: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Incredible, right? Incredible. I mean, we serve 41 million clients in Europe. Think about the transaction data alone. The number of transactions per second that we process on Black Friday is gigantic. And the technology behind making that happen is fascinating.
Jeroen: We have two elements in this podcast that always come back. One of them is: do you have a particular book that you found inspiring, or perhaps many books? We once had a professor who came with 12 books, so that’s also fine. But maybe you can tell me. This is one of the two questions I always send beforehand.
Daniele: One is a book called Quiet, by a lady named Susan Cain. The subtitle is essentially The Power of Introverts. It was the first time I saw something that described me, so to say. How come you go to a party and close yourself in a room to read? And this is totally normal, right? I always felt it was a bit weird, but it’s completely normal. So that normalized being an introvert. That’s one book. Another one is—
Jeroen: Sorry to interrupt, but how old were you when you read this?
Daniele: Oh, later on.
Jeroen: Was it recently, or 10 or 20 years ago?
Daniele: No, this was twenty-something years ago. Yeah.
Jeroen: Because you would describe yourself as an introvert?
Daniele: Oh, big time, yes. Yeah. And don’t be fooled.
Jeroen: So do you like a conversation like this, or is it annoying?
Daniele: Yeah, I think you’re using the wrong perspective. I like it, but the difference between introverts and extroverts is not whether you like it or not. It’s where you get your energy. This conversation consumes energy for me. If you had an extrovert here, it would charge them. And so I need to have my solo time, my time alone, to recharge my batteries. That’s the only difference.
Jeroen: The reason I keep asking follow-up questions about this is that I find it really interesting. I think a lot of people aren’t aware that they are introverts because they are quite extroverted in their behaviour. That also applies to me, right? People always think I’m super extroverted, but I love being alone. I actually need it. That’s why I like how you explained it, right?
Daniele: That’s introversion.
Jeroen: It’s the source of energy.
Daniele: That’s the source of energy.
Jeroen: But the question is: if you manage 20,000 people, you’re mainly in meetings, I’m sure. So how do you do that? How do you get the energy balance right?
Daniele: Well, first of all, the commuting life helps a little because when I come back home here, I’m alone, right? Not that I don’t like being with my family. I adore them above everything. But having that hour in the early morning or late evening when there is just silence is enough.
Jeroen: That’s great. Thanks. Yeah, that’s why I like these books, because they tell us a lot about you. And sorry, I interrupted you. You wanted to share another book.
Daniele: Oh, I have a long list of them.
Jeroen: Oh no, keep going.
Daniele: Yeah, well, because you were asking when I read certain books. One book that was with me from probably the age of 10 to 12 was a book about myths and legends, because I was a child before Harry Potter. And, of course, Greek mythology was a thing. I remember reading that book a thousand times because it gave me a lot of imagination and yet a lot of proximity to real life, right? I had my favourite gods. It was, yeah…
Jeroen: Did you reread it or share it with your children later?
Daniele: Well, I didn’t reread it. The book is still there, and I kept it. So it’s still on my main bookshelf. I gave it to the children, but Harry Potter was already there. That was too competitive. I had no chance. But at least two of them read the full saga, so I’m already happy enough with that.
Jeroen: That’s great. Do you want to share another book as well, or is that it?
Daniele: Well, there’s an interesting one by a professor. I’ve forgotten his name, but the title of the book is On Bullshit.
Jeroen: On Bullshit.
Daniele: On Bullshit, yeah. It’s a fascinating book, especially in times of AI.
Jeroen: Why is that?
Daniele: Because it essentially explains that there is truth and there are lies. When somebody tells a lie, they know that they are not telling the truth. That’s an explicit action. Bullshit is the space in between. It’s where you don’t care whether something is right or wrong, but you say something that appeals to the person listening to it. That plausibility of statements is a very interesting way of reading reality today, in times of AI, social media, influencers and populism, when what you say just has to fit what the listener expects to hear.
Jeroen: Is that Harry G. Frankfurt? Does that sound familiar?
Daniele: Exactly, exactly. That’s the one.
Jeroen: I just looked it up. So what’s the most important point he makes?
Daniele: It’s essentially explaining what bullshit is, right? Putting it between truth and lies.
Jeroen: Just recognizing it.
Daniele: Just recognizing it, exactly.
Jeroen: It’s quite—well, not quite, but extremely—relevant today.
Daniele: I think it’s gigantic. More than ever, right?
Jeroen: Absolutely. That’s interesting. And when did you read this, approximately? It was first an essay from 1986 and then a book in 2005.
Daniele: Exactly. I think I probably already had children when I read the book, so it might have been 2007 or 2008.
Jeroen: Did you ever give it to someone as well?
Daniele: Yeah, yeah. This is one of the traditional gifts I gave to people when I left companies.
Jeroen: Well, maybe you should start distributing it to people before you leave. So, unless you have another book you want to share, please feel free.
Daniele: Very good, right?
Jeroen: Very good. The other element we always have in the podcast is a couple of what I tend to call unusual questions. One of them is: I’ll give you whatever number—let’s say 200 million. I recently had a guest who is worth, I think, four or five billion, so I made it 200 billion for him because otherwise it doesn’t work. But with you, maybe 200 million is still a serious number, I guess. Or I’m missing something. But let’s say I give you 200 million now, in your private account, and you need to spend it as soon as possible—within two weeks, for example. What would you do with it?
Daniele: I would buy shares in ING.
Jeroen: Buy shares in ING?
Daniele: Exactly. And then move on. Yeah, because it’s a very sound investment and it’s something that is going to generate a return for me as a shareholder, which then allows me to really build something with it. So the first answer is: I’ll invest it. What would I do with the return?
Jeroen: So that’s more the question, right?
Daniele: So, and I think that is…
Jeroen: You’re a banker.
Daniele: I’ve been here too long.
Jeroen: Yeah, exactly.
Daniele: Look, it’s probably a mix of things. On the one hand, I would fulfil some dreams, right? And I’m not talking about anything material in the sense of: I would like to have this car or that car. I couldn’t care less about that. But I can imagine myself with a farm in a nice place, spending my life surrounded by green, so to say, which, weirdly enough, is a dream that many of my fellow CIOs have. I don’t know why, but I know at least two others with a similar dream.
And I would probably start supporting a number of invisible organizations. There is a hell of a lot happening below the surface, with people taking on tasks that governments, states and society don’t take on, but that require frontline workers. It can be many things. It can be the prevention of domestic violence or the prevention of child abuse. There are plenty of organizations doing fundamental, invisible and frequently insufficiently recognized work.
Jeroen: Do you already do something with these kinds of organizations?
Daniele: Well, very loosely. My wife works for one, so yeah, I’m a bit close to that.
Jeroen: I see. Wow, that’s great. Just to add for the listeners: this was not investment advice. Although investing in ING is probably a good plan from your perspective, it’s not investment advice from your end, I guess.
Daniele: No, absolutely not.
Jeroen: Given that you’re a listed company.
Daniele: No, no, no, no. It’s just my personal preference.
Jeroen: Yes, exactly. I get it. Just to be sure. The other somewhat unusual—or actually pretty unusual—question is: what has been the scariest moment in your life?
Daniele: Well, define ‘scary’, right? Scary in the sense of… Probably the scariest moment was the sense of solitude when I lost my father, because you only recognize afterwards that having a generation behind you gives you a sense of support, right? You can always lean back and you are supported. That solitude is not scary in the sense of a horror movie. It’s more of a below-the-surface type of scary, right? It’s a structural loneliness. So that was probably the moment, yeah.
Jeroen: Was this a long time ago?
Daniele: Twenty-three years ago. So relatively… Well, it depends. But that drives choices, because he was an age that I’m starting to reach now, right? At the time, I felt that he was old, but meanwhile, I can say that he was young.
Jeroen: And it was unexpected?
Daniele: No, it was unexpected.
Jeroen: Yeah, no, I can imagine that. And it also takes a lot of energy, I guess.
Daniele: Yeah, for many years. Yeah, yeah.
Jeroen: Given that I’m with a CTO now, I can compare these kinds of losses to CPU usage. You don’t see it all the time, but it takes energy from you all the time. It’s the base load.
Daniele: It’s in the back of your soul, yeah.
Jeroen: Thank you for sharing. If you could change one decision from the past, what would it be?
Daniele: Bottom line, probably nothing. Even the stupid things I’ve done led me, in a way, to where I am today. I mean, there is this Japanese technique called kintsugi, where they repair broken pottery with gold because they celebrate the fractures as something that makes the object unique. If I look back, even at the things that made me suffer really hard, professionally but also in general, I’m here partly because of them. As a consequence, I made different choices afterwards, right?
If you take my professional life, at some point I didn’t accept a role because I saw a person who reminded me a lot of somebody I had encountered in the past, and that had been a very bad choice for me, right? So you end up becoming who you are also because of the wrong choices you made. So no, I wouldn’t redesign anything.
Jeroen: Do you have a somewhat unusual hobby or something you do in your personal life that not many people do?
Daniele: Well, besides woodworking, I’m also a decent shooter, right? So, yeah.
Jeroen: Which is definitely a great answer. And you do that back home in Switzerland?
Daniele: In Switzerland, yeah, yeah.
Jeroen: Is it a way to relax as well?
Daniele: Yeah, big time. Yeah.
Jeroen: Is that because you need to focus and cannot think about anything else?
Daniele: That’s exactly it, because there is an element of meditation, so to say. The moment before the shot itself is a moment of emptiness, where everything has to be, so to say, flowing. So yes, yeah.
Jeroen: And are you good at it because you have really good eyesight or a very steady way of doing it? I don’t know much about it, but—
Daniele: Because I have a very empty mind.
Jeroen: An empty mind. That’s great. The other thing I wanted to ask you is: if you could give your younger self, or someone starting at ING today, a tip—perhaps one of the junior engineers you’re still hiring, as you said earlier in this interview—what kind of tip would you share with them?
Daniele: The thing that helped me most, in hindsight—I didn’t know it at the time—was developing a mental model of how things work: a company, a system or the world, in a way. Having a mental model allows you to develop a vision. If you don’t have a view of how things are glued together, you’re just doing your tasks. You can never go beyond your task because you cannot imagine how things are or how they should be going forward.
So you need to learn how things are glued together in order to tell a story that goes beyond the horizon. A senior career, like that of a CTO, is not just about execution. It’s about being able to point the organization in a direction beyond the horizon that the organization would not otherwise see.
Jeroen: So what exactly is the mental model, as you tend to call it? Because I’m not sure I fully understand it.
Daniele: Yeah, a mental model… As I mentioned before, when you say AI is changing everything, I say: well, there are some things that remain exactly the same. That is part of a mental model. I have a strong belief that software engineering, the software-development lifecycle and its phases remain the same, right?
Or ITIL, right? There is this very boring process definition—well, I’m sorry, it’s a taxonomy—that remains valid. You still have to manage incidents, and if you have more incidents, you still have to manage the problems. So this is part of my mental model. You need to build that yourself.
Jeroen: If we go back to the tip for someone who is just starting, the obvious question is: how do you do that? Because it seems quite difficult to build it yourself as a junior, right?
Daniele: Well, but that is exactly professional experience. There is one thing I keep telling graduates, or people who want to listen: be patient. I remember that I was extremely impatient about my career. When do I get that role? When do I get the promotion? When do I get the next one?
I respect that impatience, but at the same time, it’s only by staying in a role long enough that you learn what lies between the lines of your task. It is not just about delivering what you’re asked to deliver. It’s about putting it in a broader context, and that requires a lot of time and discussions with other people in your field.
Jeroen: So can you only get it through experience, or are there ways to go faster than simply gaining experience?
Daniele: Well, one thing that can help you go faster is to question yourself, first of all, and secondly, to talk to other people in similar roles and see how they explain their own roles and challenges. Because then you understand how the mechanics of any business work. To me, that’s the essence of learning, right? It’s having this structure in your mind of the different dimensions of your job.
Jeroen: Do you believe in this kind of 10,000-hour rule—that you simply need to work a lot and gain this experience?
Daniele: I mean, in hindsight, if I look back, I probably spent that amount of time on certain subjects. The limitation of the 10,000-hour rule is not the 10,000 hours, but what you apply them to, right? If it’s about playing basketball, okay, then you know what the activity is. If it’s about coding in Java, then you know what the activity is. But if it’s about being a CTO, I don’t have a single activity on which I can spend 10,000 hours. So it’s a bit hard to really focus that, yeah.
Jeroen: A couple of final questions from my end. First of all, you’re exactly 10 years older than I am. When I started preparing, I saw that your four children are also exactly 10 years older than mine. I have four too. So I’m just going to ask for some personal advice here: how do you raise four children? Are they all boys as well?
Daniele: No, it’s one boy and three girls.
Jeroen: Okay. That’s very different from the setup you had yourself.
Daniele: Gigantically different. I had to learn from scratch what it meant because it’s—
Jeroen: You didn’t know girls, right?
Daniele: Well, in our case, the hero is my wife. I’m very blunt about this because I also commuted to Paris for years. So she carried the burden of this, just to be very honest about what the reality was. I think the first real work is on yourself, more than on the children, because they grow up with or without you, to be very frank.
I vividly remember the moment when I accepted that our son is not like me, right? That moment of accepting that the arrow has left your bow and is flying on its own was probably the first thing that changed a lot. Of course, I tried to make him play basketball because I played basketball. He went on to play football, and I was like: “What are you doing?”
He played basketball for a while, but afterwards he confessed that he had been hiding in the locker room and just playing football with the basketball, which is a sin in basketball. I tried to teach him coding, and he simply had no interest. At the beginning, I didn’t understand: why don’t you start? Why haven’t you coded anything with the thing I gave you? He was just uninterested.
Everything changed the moment I accepted that he is himself and I am myself, and he is not me, right? So that is the only advice.
Jeroen: I guess every parent does this in a way, right? Projects a lot.
Daniele: Yeah. But the fascinating thing is how impressively they can surprise you the moment you let go, right? When they become themselves, magic happens. Then it’s gigantic.
Jeroen: Was it difficult, in a way, to let go? To accept that your children were different from you?
Daniele: For me, it was, especially with him because he was the first one, right? But yeah.
Jeroen: Because he was the first one, or because he was a boy?
Daniele: I think because he was the first one. You project expectations no matter what, right? The moment you take away those expectations, their life becomes easier because they are free. Then magic happens, as I was saying, and the surprises come.
Jeroen: Yeah. If you could mention one important value that you’ve taught them, what would it be?
Daniele: Well, I cannot say that there are values I taught them in the sense of: this is the value, you have to learn it. They also learn a lot by looking at what you do, more than by listening to what you say. So that is one part.
The other part of the challenge is that it’s very hard to discover what their passions are. So part of the effort my wife and I made was to throw ideas at them and see what—
Jeroen: What sticks.
Daniele: What sticks. Absolutely, absolutely.
Jeroen: They need to be exposed to things, like you were exposed to things by your uncle from Venezuela.
Daniele: Exactly, exactly, exactly. So you need to feed them with things and cope with the frustration that many things will fall away, but some will stay. And the ones that stay are good.
Jeroen: I love how you put that. Looking to the future, you’ve been here for two years now and seem extraordinarily passionate about ING. You’ve said multiple times that you were born ING, born Orange—all kinds of things. I thought it was a bit extreme, but okay. At least you’re very committed.
So if things continue to go as they should, I guess you see yourself staying here for quite some time. If we look beyond that time, what would you be interested in doing, apart from the farm? That is very far away in your personal life, but are there particular things you’d be interested in doing professionally?
Daniele: Yeah, you know, there is one thing I did between the previous bank and ING, which was advising some venture capital firms and helping them with their portfolio companies. That was extremely interesting because I came into contact with a lot of extremely smart people with very different problems, right? Problems generating revenue and creating solutions. It is very different from a large organization, but the amount of drive, intelligence and creativity you find there is very interesting.
Jeroen: Would you also like to start your own business at some point? Let’s say you stay at ING for another 10 years and then leave. You love to build, right? Building a business is also a kind of building project.
Daniele: Well, yes, but it would have to be with a team, with a group of people, because a lot of the building I like happens together with others. I also know where my blind spots are, and I need to have a team around me that covers those blind spots, so that what I do well contributes and what I can’t do well is taken over by somebody else.
Jeroen: Do you ever have a random idea and think: this is something I’d like to work on?
Daniele: Yeah, I also tried to start some of them many, many years ago. They never went anywhere.
Jeroen: What were they about?
Daniele: At the time, there was an idea relating to the second pillar of the Swiss pension system: to delegate it to banks instead of insurance companies. Essentially, it was an impossible feat, but at least I tried, right?
Jeroen: Looking into the future is always hard, but do you think you would ever take up farming seriously?
Daniele: No, no, no, no, no. I just like picking fruit from trees.
Jeroen: That’s brilliant, that’s brilliant. So we’re getting close to the end of this interview, and I’m going to thank you in a minute. But is there something we should have discussed? I’ve asked a lot of questions. You gave brilliant and lovely answers to all of them, but is there something you’d love to share that I missed or that we should have discussed?
Daniele: Well, maybe there is one discussion for which I have no answers. I started alluding to it with the question: how do I get the seniors of the future? Today, we don’t know what society will look like after AI. And I don’t mean which jobs will disappear or not. I’m more concerned about how learning will develop in the future, in times of AI, when you feel that knowledge is delegated to the machine, so you don’t have to know anything yourself.
How do we build and maintain societies that have a critical spirit and are able to differentiate between bullshit, stupidity and aggression, and the genuine evolution of society? So the societal impact of instruments of manipulation like AI—well, that’s a gigantic question. If you take the imitation game, or the Turing test if you prefer, 95% of the population already falls prey to AI slop. So how do you envisage and imagine a society in which you cannot trust digitally mediated communication because everything can be faked? That is the more concerning element beyond all this. It has nothing to do with banking per se, but definitely with technology and society.
Jeroen: And recognizing bullshit.
Daniele: And recognizing bullshit, absolutely.
Jeroen: Thank you, Daniele Tonella. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Daniele: My pleasure.
Jeroen: You’re the Chief Technology Officer and member of the Management Board Banking at ING. Thank you so much for taking the time. I highly enjoyed this conversation, as I said before.
Daniele: Same here.
Jeroen: You were especially very candid about everything. You’re very structured in your way of talking. I love that. At one point during the interview, you said that language is important for sharing things eloquently. Well, you definitely did that in this interview, which I highly enjoyed. So thank you so much.
I’m going to follow your career. Obviously, I’m following ING as the largest bank here in the country and, of course, through the global press. So, Daniele Tonella, thank you so much for taking the time.
Daniele: It was a pleasure.
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