Jeroen: Welcome, listeners, to a special live episode of the Leaders in Finance podcast. It’s great to have you tuning in, and wonderful to see so many of you here at the Dutch Banking Association in Amsterdam.
My guest today is Ralph Hamers, former CEO of ING and UBS and the author of the book titled Do Your Thing, subtitled Lessons from Banking’s Biggest Digital Transformation. Welcome, Ralph.
Ralph: Good morning.
Jeroen: Great to have you with us. Before we begin, I would like to thank the Dutch Banking Association and its general manager, specifically Eelco Dubbeling, here as well, and his team, of course, for hosting us today in Amsterdam.
I’d also like to thank our partners, the partners of Leaders in Finance, for their continued support. These are EY, Mogelijk Vastgoedfinancieringen, Lepaya and Duna.
Before we start the conversation, let me briefly introduce you, Ralph Hamers. You’re a Dutch banker, at first at least, investor and advisor, and best known as the former CEO of ING as well as UBS. You spent almost three decades at ING, working in the Netherlands, Romania, Belgium and Luxembourg.
In 2013, at the age of 46—is that correct, 46?
Ralph: That’s correct.
Jeroen: You became the CEO of ING Group. Over the next seven years, you completed the bank’s post-crisis restructuring and led a major digital transformation focused on customer experience, agile working and technology.
In 2020, Ralph moved to Switzerland to become Group CEO of UBS. He launched the One UBS strategy and led the bank during the 2023 negotiations that resulted in the acquisition of Credit Suisse.
Today, he chairs Banking Circle Group and Your.World, serves on the board of Scotiabank and advises several technology and AI companies.
In May 2026, I already mentioned it, Ralph published the book Do Your Thing. I’m putting it up here now for people who are watching the podcast. This is the book with, as I said, the subtitle Lessons from Banking’s Biggest Digital Transformation.
Drawing on ING’s seven-year transformation, including the setbacks and mistakes along the way—we’ll probably learn about them as well—the book explores how leaders can align purpose, strategy, customer promise, culture and execution. It also looks ahead to the impact of AI and explains why, in your view, major transformations must be led from the top.
Finally, Ralph studied business econometrics and operations research at Tilburg University. He’s 60 years old, is married to Patricia and has two grown-up children. In his free time, he loves to cycle. Nowadays in Switzerland, I guess; we’ll ask about that. He likes to read about sports and athletes, and especially to figure out what actually drives these athletes.
And if you don’t know, what do you think Ralph wanted to become as a kid? Well, I’ll tell you the answer right now: he wanted to become an army officer.
Once again, Ralph, welcome to the podcast and welcome here at the Dutch Banking Association. Great to have you with me today.
Before I start the interview and ask you questions, because I’ve been talking too much, I wanted to read one quote from quite a well-known banker, I would say: Jamie Dimon, arguably the most well-known banker in the world, who said something about your book. It’s actually in your book. The quote is as follows:
“This is far more than a banking story. Ralph shows what bold, customer-centric leadership looks like in an industry under immense pressure. His candor about the wins, setbacks and recalibrations makes this book invaluable for any executive leading large-scale change.”
That was quite a compliment, right? I would say.
Ralph: Yeah.
Jeroen: So let me start, before we move to the book. What have you been up to since you left UBS, and what are the things you’re doing right now?
Ralph: Well, these days I have a portfolio of activities. I think the commonality in those activities—and you just mentioned most of them, actually—has to do with how technology impacts business models.
And of course, with my background in the financial industry, most of the roles that I have are related to the financial industry. But there are also a couple of roles outside of the financial industry, like in AI, in the accounting practice and with Grab, which is in the mobility business.
Jeroen: Is this, putting them all together, a full-time job?
Ralph: It’s more than a full-time job. Yeah, for sure. And I like it this way.
Jeroen: Of all the things you mentioned, which is the one you spend most of your time on?
Ralph: That’s actually the one that I just took with Banking Circle. Banking Circle Group is a completely technology-driven direct clearing and settlement activity. We’re building out a global infrastructure for direct settlement and clearing.
At the same time, we generate embedded finance for the merchants that operate on our clients’ marketplaces. So basically, our clients are the Shopifys of this world, the Amazons of this world. Either we support the marketplaces in payments and lending, or we do it through the payment service providers like Stripe, Dojo in the UK or Mollie.
Jeroen: So what is the number one thing you’re bringing there, you think, if you were to ask them?
Ralph: This company is growing really fast, and that growth is also dependent on what the best legal structure is, what the best licensing structure is and what the best culture is to grow from a founder initiative to a grown-up company.
So it’s the next wave of standards that need to be introduced and implemented in order to ensure that it is a sustainable model going forward.
Jeroen: And for people who don’t know Banking Circle, what’s the size approximately?
Ralph: So the number of countries that we operate in, in terms of currencies, is currently 25. The number of people, all added together, is about 1,800. But it’s highly technology-driven, so it’s not about the number of people.
Jeroen: You can see that. How different is your life if you compare this life to your CEO life?
Ralph: Well, I’m very busy, but I don’t feel the pressure. I think that’s the difference. The CEO life is a lot of pressure. You’re very busy, but you feel a lot of pressure. And it’s also good to have that pressure, because, at least for me, that leads to performance. But there is certainly less pressure in my current portfolio.
Jeroen: Will you become CEO of a large bank again at some point?
Ralph: Well, I think if you just look at what I do with Banking Circle, for example, and some of the other roles, there’s a reason why I take chairman roles at fast-growing companies rather than public companies. It’s because, in a public company, you guide the ship a little bit, but you don’t steer it. But if you’re an executive chairman, you kind of steer it together with the CEO. So you’re just more involved.
Jeroen: So I’m not sure that’s an answer to my question, is it? Will you ever be CEO of a financial institution again?
Ralph: So what I’m trying to say is: it doesn’t matter what the title is, but I want to get my hands dirty.
Jeroen: I wanted to ask you as well about Switzerland, because that’s where you live nowadays.
Ralph: That’s true.
Jeroen: Is it most of the time in Switzerland or all the time, apart from the travelling?
Ralph: Well, we literally live there. So we moved there because of the role at UBS. And once I stepped down after the rescue of Credit Suisse, we decided to continue to live there and build our lives from there until we change our minds.
Jeroen: Where do you live? Where in Switzerland?
Ralph: Southern Zurich.
Jeroen: Okay. What are maybe the one or two biggest differences between living there and living here in the Netherlands?
Ralph: So I’ve always learned to look at the similarities, because people always focus on differences. I think that’s a little bit the problem of the world.
Jeroen: Okay, similarities first.
Ralph: This is the point, right? So even when I was working in Belgium, everybody was always kind of focused on the differences. But I’d say, well, about 90% is similar. So let’s focus on the similarities before we kind of exaggerate the problems that we may encounter.
And it’s the same with Switzerland, I guess, or any country. So the similarities are plenty in terms of it being a small country that had nothing going for it, like the Netherlands. I mean, they had the mountains and we were a swamp. They didn’t have commodities. We later had commodities, but we had to build something out of nothing.
The Swiss also built something out of nothing. So in terms of the background, the work ethos, it’s literally the same. It’s a very egalitarian society, even more egalitarian than the Netherlands in its structures and its power structures.
So I think 80% is similar. The difference is: hey, there are mountains, and we’re a very flat country, right?
Jeroen: Let’s rephrase the question. What is the number one thing we in the Netherlands can learn from Switzerland? That’s a more positive question, right?
Ralph: So I think a real strength of Switzerland, but it’s almost unique, if not truly unique, is the direct democracy that makes people really feel part of the decision-making in politics. As a consequence, there is not a lot of polarization, which is a real challenge that we have, not only in the Netherlands, but in most Western societies these days.
Jeroen: And vice versa, Switzerland learning from the Netherlands?
Ralph: Probably taking initiative, always going for it.
Jeroen: That’s typically Dutch.
Ralph: Yeah.
Jeroen: The book. First, why? Why did you write it?
Ralph: So over the last two years, I got a lot of requests to come and tell the story about the ING transformation, because it was generally regarded in the world as a very successful transformation. And it’s not obvious that transformations succeed, right? So I got a lot of C-suite requests to come and tell the story.
And then, basically, after I told the story, the question was always: how can we use these lessons for the challenges that we see currently? Specifically aimed at AI, but you can basically apply it to any other trend that you may see out there that is so impactful that you may need a transformation.
So after doing many of these sessions, my wife said: “Well, you’re putting so much time into it, not reaching too many people. It’s not a very scalable model, right?”
Jeroen: Something that resonated with you, I’m sure.
Ralph: Yeah, exactly. And then I ran into an old colleague from ING, and he said: “Maybe we should write it down.” And so I did. So I wrote the book.
I’m very happy that I wrote it, but I’m not sure it has helped me free up time, because I get more requests to tell the story now.
Jeroen: Yeah, that happens if you write a book. You either keep it to yourself or share it with the world. But two follow-up questions. Is your wife also kind of your coach sometimes? Is that what I heard?
Ralph: Well, I think that, with everybody’s partner, they help you stay who you are, right?
Jeroen: The other follow-up: did you call Steven van Rijswijk or other people at ING, like: “Hey, I’m going to use the tagline, and I’m going to write a book about you. Do you like it?”
Ralph: Well, I’ve not written it about the people at ING. It’s really about the transformation and how you transpose the learnings, both the successes and the failures. As Jamie writes, it’s a very candid story about how not everything is successful if you want to lead the way. And they were very fine with it.
Jeroen: So you did check beforehand?
Ralph: Of course, of course. The point with being a CEO, or having been a CEO, is that you always stand for that firm. So you’re the face of that firm. So I will speak in “us” and “we” about ING, and I do the same for UBS. I will always be out there being the ambassador of those firms.
Jeroen: I told you just before the recording of the podcast, off the record, but I’m going to repeat it here, that when I was preparing for this interview and after reading the book, I felt like: he says all the time, “I feel ING, I feel orange. These are my people.” You’re still talking about “we”.
I was like: yeah, maybe that’s a bit of branding, a bit of marketing. Maybe it’s true, maybe not. The jury was out for me.
But then last night, I watched your farewell video at ING for the second time, which is really, really cool to watch, by the way. I would definitely recommend watching that one. And then I was sure you mean it. It really feels like your family, right? ING still does.
Ralph: It does. I mean, I spent 29 years of my career there, right? So I joined literally in the year that ING was formed, when the insurance company and the bank were brought together, when the rebranding started, when the ambition to become a global financial conglomerate was initiated.
And I grew up in that company, right? So as I write, of course, I have orange blood flowing through my veins, like many ING people. And there is something about that company that we’re all very proud of and that binds us wherever we go.
Jeroen: Did you get a lot of responses to the book from people currently working at ING?
Ralph: So if you follow my LinkedIn, then you see there’s a lot of ING followers there as well, but also a lot of UBS followers, actually. But globally, there’s a lot of followers interested in transformation, technology and all that. So, yeah.
Jeroen: So we’re definitely going to talk about that, because obviously one of the most important things from this book, for me at least, is using this as a kind of method or a way to sharpen your thinking going forward, right? With all the AI stuff coming our way.
But if we look at it first from a kind of helicopter view, what would you say are the key success parameters for a really well-executed transformation? And I know transformations are never done. They keep coming, and new ones keep coming. So what would you say are key success parameters?
Ralph: Well, I can only speak for what I have experienced, right? So there may be other success parameters as well. But when I got asked the question, “So what made that one successful, whereas others fail?”, I can’t judge why others fail. I can only try to explain why I think ours worked.
And I’ve always been a firm believer that the CEO can delegate a lot, but there are a couple of things that a CEO can never delegate.
The first area is the area of purpose and strategy. That is something that is so connected to the CEO: what you feel the company stands for and the direction in which the company has to move. So that’s something you own. Strategy should always report to you.
Then the second step is: how do you translate the execution of the strategy into success for your stakeholders, basically, right? So how do you translate that into a customer promise? How do you translate that into a brand, and how do you translate that into reputation?
So whatever people experience externally from your purpose and strategy is something you cannot delegate. There’s a whole discussion going on on LinkedIn around my claim that a brand is owned by the CEO, because it’s about living up to the brand.
And the reason for that is the third element that I think a CEO can never delegate: how do you deliver on that promise and on that brand? And that’s all about talent, culture, behaviour and leadership. And those are the three that a CEO cannot delegate.
So what is it that we stand for, or what do we want to deliver strategically? How will that translate into what people observe and experience? And how do we literally deliver it in terms of our behaviours, the talent that we need and the leadership that we have?
Besides that, depending on where you are in a cycle, you can delegate or you can control. But these three you need to control as a CEO. That’s number one in a successful transformation, in my view, because it is about making sure that you connect the dots between those three on a continuous basis.
If I were to delegate the brand to my chief of marketing and say, “Well, go and figure out a new brand or a new logo or whatever we stand for”, and have my HR person say, “Well, we want to have different behaviours; figure out which ones they should be”, if I don’t direct that in a consistent way, connecting the dots, it’s going to fail. Because whatever we promise outside is not going to be authentically delivered on, or we can’t even deliver on it.
So it’s about connecting the dots first. Second, be incredibly consistent, which basically means that during a transformation, which takes a long time, there are a lot of new opportunities that come up. And people always come to you: “Well, Ralph, this is also a great opportunity, and maybe we can make some money here. And if we do this for our clients…”
Yeah, I understand, but it’s not strategic. If we believe we have to be a digital bank, and we’re successful in rolling out that model—for example, in Germany, we’re incredibly successful as ING, and also in Australia—we have zero branches. But every time people were then indicating, “Well, maybe we should start opening branches, because we’re going to get even more clients”, that’s not what we stand for, right? And there are many other banks that have branches. Let them deal with those clients, right?
So be very consistent about what you mean and where you want to drive the company. That’s important, because otherwise people get confused.
And the third one, and that’s the real learning, I guess, is persistence. It takes a long time. Transformation takes a long time before you can declare success. And again, it’s never finished, I fully agree with you, but at least you can declare success.
And that’s what the book is about. It took me seven years from what I thought we should stand for before we could actually live up to the promise of “Do your thing”: that clients would literally feel that they could run their business, live their lives, and that we were just there in the background.
Jeroen: Let’s do a couple of questions on all three. So first, I was wondering: you always repeat in the book and everywhere I’ve read and listened to you that you cannot delegate these things as a CEO. Does that mean that a lot of CEOs actually delegate those things?
Ralph: I do think so, yeah. I think that there are companies where CEOs delegate the brand, or basically think that they can have HR reporting to a divisional leader.
Jeroen: They’re running the business as a CFO, then?
Ralph: No, I’m not saying that. It’s just that everybody always thinks about: how can I manage my own span of control, and what are the things that should report directly to me? And which ones can I maybe delegate to somebody else on my team?
Well, if you’re one step removed from the area of brand, reputation and customer promise, and if you’re one step removed from leadership and culture, then basically you can’t manage them by connecting the dots.
So that’s why I’m saying those are the ones that you have to lead yourself, with your chief of HR, your chief of marketing or communication, and your chief of strategy.
But if you were then to delegate HR to a divisional leader, then you have to go through that divisional leader. I mean, that may be a perfect divisional leader, but it’s just that you’re one further step away from being influential over what happens there in order to deliver on what it is that you want to do.
Jeroen: Do you have a very concrete example of where you did not delegate the brand and really were busy with something that maybe other CEOs would view as very small?
Ralph: Well, I think there is one particular example in the book that we mention as well. When we started, we had a decentralised execution of our strategy, while we actually wanted to be one brand.
We had 88 different—or 84 different—debit and credit card layouts, right? And we’re one brand. So there was absolutely no reason why all of our debit and credit cards needed to look different just because we’re active in a different country. And some were blue, and some were green, and some were purple, and whatever. And basically, we said: “Well, you know, we have to line up.”
Jeroen: That’s what they stand for.
Ralph: Exactly. It’s a very simple thing. But a lot of these things, in terms of setting the examples, are in the detail. Taking that detail and explaining: “Guys, if this is the way we look outside, how are we then delivering that one customer promise, right? If we represent ourselves and translate ourselves into 84 different shapes and forms and colour schemes?”
So it’s a very small example of something that could underlie a real issue that you have to deal with to successfully deliver a company that wants to be the same and deliver the same experience to every customer.
Jeroen: The other crucial point you mentioned: consistency. So two questions there. One is: this means saying no all the time? That’s with a question mark.
And the other question, which I find even more important, is: transformations are moving, you know, things outside change. So at some point, you also need to be willing to change your strategy along the way, I guess.
It’s not like a Moscow communist five-year plan: “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to say no to everything. Whatever happens externally, we’re going to stay the course.” I guess you need to make changes as well.
Ralph: Well, the Chinese do very well at that.
Jeroen: Well, maybe you did it as a… You wanted to become an army officer, so I don’t know.
Ralph: No, no, no. So what I also try to describe in my book is that, in the way you run a transformation, making sure that you don’t lose sight of your long-term vision, you actually have to check in on a quarterly basis to see whether you’re still going in that direction.
Transformation is not a straight line. Delivering on your strategy is not a straight line. Clearly not. Things change. Societal expectations change. Legal and regulatory requirements change, et cetera.
So basically, what we did to ensure that we were able to deliver consistently on that end picture, but at the same time had time and an eye for what we needed to solve in the short term, was that every quarter we would come together as an executive team. Not delegated: as an executive team. And we would go through all the requests for changing things in three categories.
The first one is always legal and regulatory requirements. That’s about your licence to operate. There is no discussion about that. And of course, they could, for a while, kind of get you off track. But if you do it in view of where you want to go, and you repeat that, everybody knows: “Okay, we have to do this, and we will do this, but we are not losing sight of the future.”
The second one is all about business continuity. There is no choice: if you want to deliver a digital experience, it has to be 24/7. You can’t stop as a bank anymore.
In my days, when it started, we would still basically send our clients a message: “From Saturday to Sunday, please don’t open the app or the internet site, or don’t pay when you’re leaving the pub, because we may be down because we’re making the big change.”
Now the changes are being made on a daily basis, right? Because we can do it while clients are using it. It’s about business continuity. By the way, that was also about strategy.
But the third area is: what do we feel is strategic? And there are sometimes commercial opportunities that come up that are very attractive, where you can make the business case. But if they’re not in line with our strategy, we didn’t pursue them, right?
So if you do this consistently, in a disciplined way, on a quarterly basis, basically you zoom out, as I call it. You zoom out: where is it that we want to go seven, nine years from now? That’s what we see for ourselves. That’s where we need to be. Are we still on track? Yes, we are, but it is not a straight line.
What is it that we’re going to do in the next three months? Okay, we have these things, and these things, and these things. And that’s how we communicated it.
Every quarter, we communicated to the whole company—and I introduced that at UBS as well—why we were doing the things that we were doing and how they fitted the overall story.
Jeroen: So let’s say this is 100% the strategy that you’ve set out at point zero. How often have you changed the strategy to, like, 90% or 80%, or even more than that?
Ralph: Almost on a continuous basis.
Jeroen: So really, the initial strategy was completely different from the one after a few years? Was there 50% left, or was there 80% left?
Ralph: No, actually, I think there was still 100% left in terms of what it is that you want to be. We set that out for ourselves, and people didn’t like this. We basically said: “Well, banking is never a primary need.”
Banks are facilitating. The primary need is that you want to grow your company; you need to make an investment. The primary need is that you want to buy a coffee, whatever.
And the whole idea was that if we can make banking basically unnoticeable yet indispensable, then that is what we want to deliver. So in delivering that, of course, technological opportunities or client expectations change, right? But that was the idea behind it.
In that, of course, we were also looking at, for example: can we be a platform? If you’re completely in the background, how do clients still notice you? And how do you make sure that you still get the business? So how can we be where the client is, right? That was the whole concept.
So in a digital world, where you’re not walking the streets and you don’t see a branch, how do clients know about you?
One of the things that we did then in innovation is that we bought Makelaarsland in the Netherlands. Because we thought: if we have Makelaarsland and people are looking for a broker, a real estate broker, of course they’re not going to look for a broker if they don’t want to buy a house. And if they want to buy a house, they need a mortgage.
So our thought was: okay, if they’re on that site and they’re looking for a broker, somewhere in the process they will then come to us for a mortgage.
I also describe in the book that that didn’t work, right? Because people stepped out of the process and nevertheless went to an independent advisor to see what the best mortgage was.
So did it change the strategy? No. But did we fail in integrating a platform there? Yes.
Jeroen: Learn fast, as you mentioned before.
Ralph: Yeah.
Jeroen: On the business cases and saying no: I think it would be quite hard as a CEO if your top managers come to you and have this new business case for an opportunity or an acquisition or anything, and it looks financially really good, but still doesn’t fit the strategy. It’s a no.
So how often did you have to say no as CEO, whether it was at ING or UBS? All the time? Much more than yes?
Ralph: Far more than yes.
Jeroen: Very practically, what is a good way to say no to keep people engaged? Because, on the other hand, I guess you want people coming up with new ideas.
Ralph: Yeah, and they did, right? But you have to give guidance to these new ideas. One of the core successes, I think, in terms of changing the culture at ING, was that we truly wanted to be out there, right?
So one of the things I say as well is that if you want to lead, you need to look outside for inspiration. Because if you look at your peers, you can only be a follower. But if you look outside for inspiration, then of course you get new ideas.
But those new ideas you have to use for innovation in your strategic direction. So there were three levels of innovation that we initiated.
The first one was the agile way of working, which is almost like an incremental way of innovation. And of course, you fail every two weeks, because you have to review where your sprint is going and whether you have made progress. And sometimes you just have to stop.
The second way of innovation was through internal boot camps. And of course, there are many different ideas, but there are a lot of ideas that you can say yes to. But there are also a lot of ideas that you then say no to. So in the funnel, you basically explain why you say no to some and why you say yes to the others, right?
And the third one was through acknowledging that you don’t have a monopoly on good ideas, and therefore there may be things out there that you want to invest in or acquire that really fit your strategy.
But if you continuously explain what you do it for and continuously go back to: “This is what we’re trying to build. This is where we’re going. This is the progress we’re making. This is why we need to take a step aside for the short term, but we still don’t lose sight of the…” Then that works, right?
So it’s also about communication.
Jeroen: So you personally, what are the things you read or the people you talk to to get new ideas? What’s your way of thinking and brainstorming? Everyone has their own way to do that. What’s your way?
Ralph: So the beauty of being a banker—and I’m a corporate banker, right? Everybody sees me as a retail banker because of what I did at ING, but I’m actually a corporate banker—is that, as a corporate banker, you see clients all the time. So you see different industries all the time.
You can do two things if you go and visit your client and walk through their business. One is that you can start thinking: okay, what is needed, and how can I basically help this entrepreneur grow their company? But at the same time, you can also think: what is working here? What are some of the ideas I can pick up from this and see how I can use them myself?
So that’s the first source of inspiration: your clients. The second one is, in my view at least, that you have to force yourself to look outside, right? Again, if you want to lead an industry, you have to look outside your industry. Otherwise, you are a follower by definition.
Even last year, in October, I joined CEOs of large Dutch companies on a trip to Silicon Valley again, in order to see what was happening with AI and cybersecurity. And then, just two months ago, we went with another group of CEOs of large Dutch companies to China to see what was happening there.
So you’ve got to force yourself out there to look at different industries, different countries, different technologies, pieces of technology, and start thinking: okay, what can it mean for my business?
But also, if you’re doing it with other CEOs: how are you struggling with that? What do you think in your business? Why didn’t that work for you? It helps as well. So that’s another way to do it, right?
Jeroen: And how do you transform all the things you’ve seen, for example in China and the US, without—as you mentioned earlier, because that’s exactly what I thought—just copying, right? “What this large financial institution in China does, we’re going to do here at UBS or ING”, whatever.
How do you then transform that into an idea that is actually more novel or that works better here? Any thoughts on that?
Ralph: Well, I think that’s basically the beginning of my book and why I developed the strategy the way I did. Preparing for my role as CEO, I was happy that I had some time to go and travel. And as part of that, I had a five-day visit to Silicon Valley, which basically changed the whole world for me.
I had a session with Apple, and now I’m talking about 2013, right? Now everybody’s used to it, and everybody sees the opportunity, but that visit really helped me understand the use of a touchscreen on a phone.
Right before that, the touchscreen was much more about the iPad. And even there, we were still kind of: does this really work? Why don’t we go and sit behind a screen with a mouse, right?
And it just kind of came to me. I came out and said: “Well, this is the thing that we’re going to use for everything. We’re going to pay with this, right?” And people were looking at me: “This guy has gone crazy.” But this is what I said. And now everybody finds it quite normal. So that was one.
Secondly, I visited Google at that moment, and they had this beautiful, simple way to innovate. They did pretotyping. So they didn’t invest in massive projects and then, at the end of an investment of 20 million, figure out that whatever they had developed didn’t work. They would kind of “fake it before you make it”, right?
And I tried to understand how they did that. They did that in multifunctional teams, putting them together, trying to fake and mimic a situation and see what the response of customers would be, rather than doing a customer interview. In those interviews, you always get answers about what customers think they would want. But if you try it and see the behaviour, it’s completely different. That’s why we initiated agile in order to get there.
The other visit that I had there was with Singularity University. And they showed me that the power of technology would continue to increase the speed of change to the level of exponential change, as they call it.
At that moment, I saw two big industries being disrupted: the camera industry and the music industry. And my idea was: the industries that are disrupted by technology are the ones that are dealing with an immaterial good.
But if you’re shipping oil, if you’re transporting oil, or if you are building a car or whatever, there may be disruption in your industry, but it can’t be done by technology alone.
But in banking, it can, because what we deal in is definitions. We have a definition that a piece of paper is actually worth one euro, whereas the paper is not one euro. And similarly, we now have a definition of a “1” on an app, which is one euro, but it’s only a picture on an app. So banks, by definition, are always subject to disruption through technology.
And the last visit I had there, which was a real eye-opener, basically kind of a reminder, was when I visited Index Ventures. They invited me, even before I was CEO, to talk to four CEOs of new fintechs.
And I started to ask questions like: “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Why do you think you’re successful? And how do you do it?” And I thought: well, that’s inspiration for me.
And then they said: “Ralph, we want to hear from you. We want to hear from you.”
I said: “But why do you want to hear from me? Because I’m this representative of this old incumbent that has just gone through massive restructuring, et cetera, et cetera.”
And then they said: “No, no, no, no. You see it wrong. We made the analysis. We did our homework. From the internet era, out of all the initiatives in the financial world, only two survived with a sustainable business model: PayPal and ING Direct.
“Now, PayPal we can ask, because they’re our neighbours. But ING Direct, that’s you. We want to know: how did you do it? What were the stages in which you needed to develop? How did you make it sustainable? Because all the others failed.”
And I thought: well, we have something that we had forgotten about at ING that we can actually kind of restart.
So if you’re really open to what you see and you try your best to translate that into something, it can change your strategy.
Voice-over: This is the Leaders in Finance podcast with Jeroen Broekema.
Jeroen: So, Ralph, I will allow a couple of people here in the audience to ask questions. I think there is a question here. Please tell me your question. I will repeat it for the microphone.
Audience member: Yes, so, in the midst of a new digital transformation, what are your views on the current state of technological development and the lessons we can learn from that?
Jeroen: So I would kind of rephrase this or put it in my own words: the lessons you have learned, taking them forward now in a completely new situation with AI and all the technological changes that are coming up, what can we use from the past going forward? To the person who asked the question, if I may: is that correct?
Ralph: Yes, so thanks for the question. It’s actually what I wrote the book for. I wrote the book to explain a framework that I think can be successful in transformation. And transformation is generally an answer to a burning ambition, and not so much a burning platform.
Jeroen: Wait one second. This is the term you use all the time, everywhere. So what exactly does it mean? Not a burning platform, but a burning ambition?
Ralph: Well, I think people often mistake the need for restructuring for the need for transformation. The need for restructuring is generally an answer to a burning platform, which basically means everybody sees that a division is not performing very well, or we’re actually in a crisis.
And it’s very easy to explain to your people that we need to change, because they see it burning. It’s a burning platform. It’s hard work, but once you’re done, you’re done with restructuring.
Transformation is an answer to a burning ambition. And a burning ambition is something that you see out there. If you don’t change your company, it may actually threaten your existence, right?
The moment you can translate that burning ambition into a compelling story and get people to buy into the need for change, even though they don’t really see the need for change because the results are still good and clients are still happy—but you see that there is something out there that, if we don’t change, may actually threaten our business—that is a burning ambition for which you need transformation, right?
And in view of this, back to your question, there are different trends that you may spot, whether those are sectoral trends, societal trends or technological trends. You always have to keep checking whether they impact your strategy and whether you then need to transform in order to deal with those trends, right? So that is, in my view, the work of a CEO.
And if you now look at the technological trend, with AI being that trend, then the first question is not: “How can we make AI our strategy?” Because that’s the mistake, right? Everybody says: “Well, we have to do something with AI. We have to do something with AI.”
Well, do you? Do you? That’s the first question.
So do you actually think that AI and the application of AI is something technical that can improve your effectiveness, your productivity, something like that? Or is it a strategic opportunity or threat? That’s the first question that you need to ask.
The moment the answer is that AI, if you don’t deal with it, becomes a strategic threat or is a strategic opportunity, then you have to review your strategy in view of your purpose.
And then you may need a transformation in order to create a change in your DNA, to ensure that you can deal with that new threat on a sustainable basis. Sorry.
Jeroen: No, no, it’s all right. To answer kind of your own question: at the moment, for large banks, for example here in the Netherlands, is it really an opportunity? Is it a strategic opportunity—sorry, I should say strategic—or is it more about cutting costs and making things more efficient? Or is it really a growth opportunity?
So in other words, is it in the direction of not becoming a burning platform, but is it really a burning ambition?
Ralph: Clearly, the banks currently don’t see a burning platform. Interest rates are helping.
Jeroen: Which makes it harder to innovate and to transform, I guess, right? If you’re making a lot of money.
Ralph: If you think that only a burning platform can be the reason for doing that, yes. But if you have a leader who thinks in terms of burning ambition, because he or she sees that there is something out there that may happen to your core business, and if you don’t deal with the situation now, you may lose it, then you have to act from a burning ambition perspective, even if your results are very good, right?
So in this case, back to your question, I actually think that banks can certainly benefit from AI. I see it more as a benefit than a threat. And banks can benefit from AI in areas where there’s content intensity, right?
That is generally in advisory roles. That’s in the mortgage process, where there are a lot of documents to be reviewed, et cetera, et cetera.
So in areas where we have not been able to improve the way we deal with customer needs and service them even faster and more transparently—in wealth advice or mortgage advice, for example—I think that’s where AI can really bring change.
Jeroen: Or is it more like, with mortgages, becoming more efficient? Is it really growth?
Ralph: So the demand itself will not change, because the demand for mortgages is basically outside the bank, right?
For mortgages, it may very well be a way to be more efficient, to be more transparent, and then you can have a competitive advantage over your competitors, so that you, as a bank, can grow faster than the others. That’s certainly the case.
In wealth, honestly, I think it is a game changer. And the reason why it’s a game changer is that, in wealth management and portfolio composition, there is just not a human being who can translate that client need into an investment portfolio, dealing with 15,000 products that are out there. It’s just humanly impossible, right? To get the best portfolio that meets your needs. It’s just humanly impossible.
And therefore, I expect more disruption there than in some of the more common processes in banking.
And besides that, if I may continue to talk about banking anyway, I actually think that banks are incredibly well positioned to deal with AI.
Regulators have helped us to get really strong data management, whether it is data ingestion, data lineage, making sure that we use the right data for the right purpose, the ethics around data or the privacy aspects of data. The unwanted bias that may come out of our models is governed through model governance, model testing and model validation.
So banks are very well positioned to deal with the opportunity of AI, because we have the data, we have the right models.
And therefore, I don’t see AI very much as a disruptor for banks, but very much as an opportunity. And it’s more an evolutionary opportunity than a revolutionary opportunity.
Jeroen: I’m sure the audience here will like this. But just to push that a bit further: will there be banks that will actually be disrupted by AI and lose their raison d’être?
Ralph: AI only has fertile ground to be successful if you have the right data, if you have the right governance around it, if you don’t make the simple mistakes, right? So it takes a lot of time to get there.
Banks have an incredible head start over new initiatives. That was different with digital. In digital, you can actually build a business model around digital and attack banks, like [company name unclear] is doing and like ING has done in Germany and Australia, where basically we have become a dominant player from nothing. And Revolut is becoming a dominant player from nothing. So that’s digital.
And with AI in banking, I haven’t seen a business model built around that and attacking other banks yet. So it’s more the digital aspect still than the actual AI in it. For the moment, for the moment.
Jeroen: We go to a question from the audience. I will repeat it. Yeah.
Audience member: Thank you. Investing in digital transformation or AI transformation takes a lot of money. When you left ING, ING changed its course and scaled down investments. Did the burning ambition leave with you, or what is your opinion on their reducing the investments in their digital transformation?
Jeroen: So investing in digital and AI, in that transformation, costs a lot of money. The person asking the question is saying that, specifically with ING, the investment has actually been scaled down. And then the actual question is: was it because of a leadership change or not?
Ralph: I don’t think so. Again, ING has continued its journey to be a digital leader. And it’s very clear that they’re incredibly successful with it. Just look at where we are digital-only players. So that has continued.
There is certainly an analysis we made towards the end of my term that, already when I was there, made us think about how far we could go in building one bank across different countries.
And in that, we were able to standardise the way we interacted: the one app. We were able to standardise the way we do data management and risk management, or risk management policies, and standardise pieces of technology. But we were not able to deal with the country-specific areas, which made it particularly challenging to turn some countries profitable in a low-rate environment. That was one.
So it was the low-rate environment that made us think at that moment: how long will this take, and is it worth continuing to invest in it?
Plus, an assumption underlying the transformation was that we would be able to do balance sheet optimisation between countries. And we expected that balance sheet optimisation to be allowed as a result of a banking union that we expected to be completed. It’s not.
So in the banking union, we have moved to a Single Supervisory Mechanism, which, by the way, is a very strong and good move in terms of ensuring that there is a level playing field in the standards that banks in Europe are held to.
But we haven’t received any benefit from it in terms of actually being able to run our banks like a European bank, rather than as a country-by-country bank.
So the combination of not being able to do balance sheet optimisation and a low-rate environment made us look at the geographic portfolio and, from that perspective, come to some conclusions.
Jeroen: So if you were CEO of a large bank again today, related to AI, what would be one of the first things you would do? Apart from starting to read, I’m sure. What would be actual strategic things you would set out?
Ralph: Well, again, I’m not convinced it is strategic. What you have to do is really go through the opportunities that AI as a technology can bring and how quickly you can develop proof points that work for you. That’s one.
So you start in an agile way. Let’s just try and see where it gets us, whether something is worthwhile and whether there is a true business case. That’s one.
Second, once you see that, you should certainly go to the areas where you feel that, if we don’t deal with the opportunity and others do, that could become a real competitive disadvantage for us.
So we have to make sure that it becomes a competitive advantage. We have to be faster than the others. So speed, an agile way of working to deal with the opportunity and, once proven, sharing that practice across the different areas in your bank. That’s what you should do.
Of course, as I said, you have to review on a quarterly basis which things are short-term opportunities or threats and which things are trends. And the moment you detect a trend, you have to analyse whether it’s impacting your strategy or not.
Jeroen: When I worked at one of the large Dutch banks, and also later on for a fintech, I always thought businesses like big tech—let’s say Apple, which you mentioned before, or others—would actually become serious competitors to the banks. But it looks like they didn’t.
Ralph: Well, they have.
Jeroen: To what extent?
Ralph: They’re all involved.
Jeroen: Are they very big competitors, you think?
Ralph: Well, I mean, they have become an intermediary. As a consequence, the threat is there that you lose contact with your end customer. So yes, they have become a real player.
And that’s what I’m saying: I haven’t seen the initiatives in the AI space that we did see back then, both with the big guys like Google and Apple, with Google Pay and Apple Pay, and with the fintechs that really built around a new business model. And they have been really, really successful.
So what we expected has happened. Look at Klarna. Look at Adyen. Look at Revolut, right?
We’re very happy that ING is there as well, with ING in Germany, in Spain and in Australia. But these guys came from nothing.
Jeroen: They will become much bigger, even bigger than they are already?
Ralph: Revolut is showing it. Adyen is showing it.
Jeroen: So these are the number one competitors for the banks?
Ralph: For pieces of what you do. The beauty of technology is that you don’t need to do everything, but that you can literally attack specific parts of a value chain, right?
Jeroen: But at some point, you have collected a lot of these parts, and all of a sudden you put them together, and you’re maybe even as powerful, or not?
Ralph: Well, yes, if you put them together. But the question is whether that makes you stronger, right?
So this is what Banking Circle does. We do instant settlement and clearing across currencies. It takes banks three days, with correspondent banks in different countries, to do that. We do it instantly.
We’re taking that piece of the value chain, and we become a real competitor for the banks there. It either drives their prices down, because otherwise they will lose business, or it forces them to invest heavily in these areas if they see it as strategic. Or, at a certain moment, they may decide to outsource it, right?
Adyen just took the payment service space for e-commerce, right? Very focused, but highly specialised and highly scalable.
Klarna took a piece of the business. I’m not sure that banks want to play there in terms of the way they do it. But nevertheless, they do it in a way that you can do consumer lending at your fingertips, right?
Banking Circle, through YouLend, does merchant lending at your fingertips. We score on payment behaviour, social media feedback and credit bureau information, within literally a split second, whether you can have a $5,000 to $10,000 loan as a merchant active on Shopify.
Banks can’t do that. It’s basically a segment of banking where the business model of banks is too expensive to do it.
Jeroen: So what should they do? Because you’re describing this trend, I’d be a little worried if I were CEO and saw all these things around me. I recently learned that also Revolut… Although maybe it’s more digital than AI. I find it an interesting distinction. We could discuss it as well.
But let’s go back to what you should do as a CEO if you see all these pockets where people are trying to do specialised things. What should you do as a bank CEO?
Ralph: Decide what it is that you want to be and what it is that you want to fight for.
Or, in other words, when I came up with the strategy—and I’m not sure that that part of the strategy actually worked out—I was already talking about this. Basically, I translated the strategy for people to understand it, and for myself also to be able to show what I was thinking. I used a lot of one-liners just to make it clearer.
So the first one was: “We want to be a tech company with a banking licence.” Okay, this is all about needing different talent. We need engineering talent, et cetera.
We also indicated: “People need banking, but not banks”, right?
We also indicated that we want to be a bank without a balance sheet. Basically, what Revolut is doing. If we have the customer, if we understand the customer, we don’t need to own the product in order to be valuable to the customer, right?
But if you know the customer and you understand the customer, and somebody else can provide the product, you’re a platform.
Jeroen: How are the Dutch banks positioned? Now you have your Swiss lenses to look at the Dutch banking landscape. Are they positioned well compared to the rest of Europe or the world?
Ralph: I think the Dutch banks in general, the Nordic banks, let me put it that way, have always been more digital and digitally focused than the southern banks. With the exception, maybe, of Spain. Spain is really leading on digital as well, and the Turks as well, by the way.
I think Dutch banks face a threat of not seeing the urgency because of their big mortgage books.
Jeroen: And the high-interest-rate environment.
Ralph: It just makes money, right?
Jeroen: I mean, the whole point is that… They’re all making good money right now.
Ralph: If you’re a Dutch bank, you know your P&L for the next year. You know it when you do nothing, and you know it when you work very hard, because you start with a loan book in mortgages and corporate loans that generally makes up 80 to 90% of your P&L.
And mortgages don’t repay very fast. So they will be there next year as well, right? In terms of direct results and getting signals through a deterioration of results, those signals don’t come as easily in Dutch banks.
Banks that work with more efficient balance sheets, like the American banks, or platforms, have to be on the move all the time, right? They have to be on the move all the time.
But that’s why it’s good that we have people leading in the Netherlands with a burning ambition, and I see that with most of the bankers, actually.
Jeroen: So creating that sense of urgency, ultimately, is arguably the most important thing the CEO should do, especially in this environment where making money is relatively easy and relatively predictable.
Ralph: Exactly.
Jeroen: Okay, clear. We have a bit of time left. Oh, there are questions now. That’s great. So, a question there.
[Audience question not captured in the transcript; Jeroen repeats it below.]
Jeroen: How do you keep Europe competitive, and what can banks do, especially if it’s still a fragmented market? That’s the question.
Ralph: So I do think that we need banking consolidation in Europe. The question is not so much when. Because it will happen the moment we finish the banking union.
Jeroen: Yeah, we’ve been talking about it for a while.
Ralph: Yeah, I know, but this is the point. If you finish the banking union, if we go all the way and you can truly manage your balance sheet across borders, a lot of competitiveness will basically be unleashed at that moment.
Not only in scale, but literally in savings in how you run your business, right?
Very simply, I always try to explain it like this: if Shell can only sell the LNG that they get out of Qatar back into Qatar, that’s the banking story.
If the euros that come through savings in Germany can’t be used anywhere else, but you have to use them in Germany, there is a limit to the efficiency and the size of what you can do.
Jeroen: Did you get the answer, or do you want to…? Yeah, good. There’s another question here.
[Audience question only partly captured in the transcript; Jeroen repeats it below.]
Jeroen: So you’re now chairman of Banking Circle, a fintech. What are things you see from the inside that you couldn’t see as CEO of a large bank?
Ralph: Well, they actually make it possible. There are things that, in a larger bank, are difficult to do because the relative size will not be sufficient to continue the investment. And it will always be like that.
So if you’re a bank, you can invest a euro in the efficiency of your mortgage system, or a euro in developing a new way to score merchants online. The business case generally goes to the mortgages. It’s easy money to be made.
And so there are things that you just find difficult to do in a bank. Then you have to separate them into areas that the CEO has to protect: the innovation areas, with dedicated money just to do that. And that’s what we did.
We had some real successes there, but we also had some failures. And I do think that the acceptance of failure within large banks, or within regulated banks, is lower, because people just don’t understand that failure is a way to learn.
Whereas outside the banking space, in the venture space, there’s failure all the time. But they want the CEOs who have gone through a failure, because they have learned.
Jeroen: What was your big failure that ultimately helped you get the job at UBS, because they want to see CEOs who have gone through a big failure?
Ralph: Yeah. So the acceptance of failure in the way we moved to digital, right? We were the first [unclear] to introduce agile.
The whole world visited ING in those years to look at what these guys had done and what had failed in their implementation. And we shared those things.
Even beyond that, we learned that agile is not a solution for everything. Agile is very good in the change and DevOps environment. So basically, [unclear] new products or new features in a product or a better customer experience.
But we also introduced agile in the service and sales areas. And it didn’t work, right?
So for UBS to take a CEO whom they want to lead their digital transformation, to take all those lessons so that they don’t have to go through the same failures, and can have their own failures—because, of course, there will be new failures to learn from—it’s a bit of risk management for them.
Jeroen: There’s another question here.
[Audience question not captured in the transcript; Jeroen repeats it below.]
Jeroen: So we’re talking a lot about lessons in this conversation. Are there also things you need to unlearn?
Ralph: So I grew up in a banking world where most things were local, right? Banking was local. You built local banks, local insurance companies, et cetera.
And of course, ING before my time always had its ideas around: can we standardise technology? Can we standardise this? And I believed, truly believed, in the decentralised concept.
When I started the transformation, where we had buy-in in terms of the direction, we said: “Okay, let’s first, after restructuring, start to build speed, create momentum in terms of change and customer growth.” And that’s what we did.
But after a couple of years, we came to the conclusion that, in terms of really fulfilling that vision—that we can be one bank with the same experience, the same promise, the same delivery, even the same pricing across borders—I had to move away from my old belief that you can only do it in a decentralised way.
And that’s what I describe as well. It was a big change for me as a leader to accept that, okay, if I really want to think like Facebook, which everybody uses and which is the same everywhere in the world, why does banking have to be different in every part of the world?
It’s very strange, and Revolut is proving it as well. So we were proving that as well.
But you can only do that if you make the shift from decentralised execution to a more centralised or standardised execution. And that was a big change for me as a leader, but also for ING as a culture.
Jeroen: I have room for one or two other questions. So if you… Yeah, there is one.
Audience member: Thank you.
[The rest of the audience question is not captured in the transcript; Jeroen repeats it below.]
Jeroen: So we’ve seen a lot of geopolitical turmoil over the last few years, and even longer, actually, but it’s getting to a point that’s quite extreme. We’re also very dependent on US tech. What should we do, basically?
Ralph: Well, I mean, we should support European tech development, I guess. That’s what we need to do. But you can’t force banks or any other industry to move away from a particular piece of technology if we don’t have a credible alternative available yet, right? So that’s one.
Second, you have to think this one through. We talk a lot about that, right? We should be able to be the master of our own domain and be in control of our own environment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the question is: where does it end? Where does your dependence end?
Just to take a data centre, right? I use this example all the time to say: okay, how far do you want to go?
So you want to have your own data centres here in the Netherlands. Okay, good. Let’s build them. Good. We build them ourselves. Okay, good.
So where are the servers coming from? Oh, they should not be from Google. Okay, good.
Where should the chips come from? Oh, they should certainly not be NVIDIA or the Google chips either. Okay, so we need to have our own chips as well. Yeah, we need our own chips. Good.
And what energy should they be running on? It goes as far as that. We’re still importing our energy. So where does the self-sufficiency… [unclear]
Jeroen: It’s probably more about diversification, right?
Ralph: No, no, no, but this is about geopolitics. There is always a dependence, and the question is: if you peel the onion, there will always be a piece where you are dependent until you have your own resources.
So it takes a lot of time before we can truly speak about sovereignty, if we even want it, right? Because dependency also opens communication and trade, right?
I know we’re moving away from globalisation, but some dependency is not bad to have if you can counter it, right?
And then, in the end, is it that we want to have it all in the Netherlands for the Netherlands, and the Germans for the Germans, and the French for the French? So there’s a question as to where sovereignty really ends.
Jeroen: I understand you cannot be fully sovereign. And then this definitely leads to degrowth, by the way, because if all countries retreat to their own country, it doesn’t work in a very…
Ralph: But that’s one of the challenges that we see right now, right?
Jeroen: To rephrase the question in another way: should the Dutch banks or the European banks become less dependent on the US?
Because ultimately, that’s what I mentioned with diversification. You could still be dependent on the US, but maybe also dependent on Switzerland or any other country in the world.
Ralph: Give me the provider that does data centre management at the scale that banks need that is non-US, and we can talk.
Jeroen: Yeah. I see that.
Ralph: No, but it’s the point, right? It takes time. It takes time for us to build that.
And I do think that self-sufficiency is important for the EU to strive for. I do think that we should support initiatives and investments that go towards decreasing dependency in technology, whichever piece of technology we’re talking about. I’m absolutely a supporter.
Jeroen: A couple of last questions to wrap up this conversation. First of all, this podcast is called Leaders in Finance. You’re a strong believer that leadership is extremely important for transformations and for everything.
But when it comes to leadership, it’s ultimately about people. And I wonder about the leader, the CEO of the future. You mentioned earlier: it’s a tech company in a financial space. So what kind of leaders do we ultimately need?
Could we, for example, see someone with a non-financial background? That would still have to be checked by the regulators. That’s a hard one, but still, to become the CEO.
Ralph: Well, actually, you touch upon a very important point. I do think that we’re going overboard with the requirements that we set for people who can help banks, whether it’s in executive teams or on boards, because I do think that knowledge of other industries is crucial for banks to stay ahead.
And if we only organise ourselves with bankers who, to a certain extent, all think alike, we create blind spots.
So I’m actually a proponent of making sure that we have diverse boards and diverse executive teams. You should be open to having people and professionals in a bank’s leadership who don’t necessarily come from banks. So that’s my first point.
Second, because your question was about what current leaders should have, right? I think specifically now, with everything that’s going on, whether it’s societal trends, geopolitical trends or technological trends, CEOs have to be outward-looking and not inward-looking, because you will miss the point, you will miss an issue there. So that’s one.
Second, it is truly up to the leader to have a long-term vision, because short-termism is, of course, the name of the game these days. And if the leader doesn’t keep checking where you want to be over the years, then who will? And specifically, corporate leaders need to do that, in my view.
And the third one is that, in view of the many changes, you have to be agile. And it’s not just about using the word. It’s the way we practised it at UBS and at ING: on a quarterly basis, you review, zooming out, where do we need to be? Where do we want to go? Versus: what are the priorities for the next three months or the next six months?
How do we decide on priorities, ensuring that we, at the same time, deal with the short-term challenges but keep that agility, without being stubborn about anything? That agility is important to have in your character.
Jeroen: Very quick follow-up. On the CEO: for example, if you were on the non-executive board of, let’s say, JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon, whom we mentioned earlier, is leaving, and you could hire the CEO of Google, the former CEO of Google or Apple, and regulators would allow it—I know they don’t, but if they did—would you think that’s a good move?
Ralph: If surrounded by all the other bankers, it could be a very good move, yeah.
Jeroen: Number one tip for the audience listening and here in the room. Number one tip.
Ralph: You have distraction at your fingertips. Take time to think.
Jeroen: So, mobile phone away, just sit on a mountain in Switzerland and think.
Ralph: Well, I mean, everybody has their own practice.
Jeroen: Or cycle, in your case, maybe. Is that a moment for you to reflect, being on your bike?
Ralph: Actually, for me, it’s going to church. But everybody has their own kind of ways to do it.
Jeroen: That’s great. Is there a particular book that comes to mind that you would recommend to anyone?
Ralph: There are many books, right? But a book I really like is Rutger Bregman’s Humankind. I really like that.
This is all about how people are good. People are, in essence, good. And in this world, we all think the opposite. So I’m a big fan of that book.
I’m a big fan of Jim Collins’s Good to Great, because I think the lessons there have been proven and are still valid in terms of how you build a sustainable business.
Jeroen: Do you know Rutger Bregman yourself?
Ralph: No.
Jeroen: I’d love to have you both in a podcast. I think it’s a really interesting setting. Maybe we should talk about it after the interview.
[Brief exchange unclear in the transcript.]
Jeroen: Last question before I’m going to thank you is on the future. Is there anything you would love to be doing going forward in the financial industry or anywhere else? Is there something on your mind that you would love to do?
Ralph: What I like to do generally is get people moving, right? That’s what I like. I always look at the positive things and at the opportunities that we have.
And we started an initiative in the Netherlands to look at how we can ensure that the future revenue model in the Netherlands is intact and that we can support that. Because we need it.
Jeroen: You’re worried about it, right?
Ralph: I’m worried about it from the perspective that, if we want to defend our current social welfare, which is a great thing to have, then we can’t continue to talk about dividing the pie. We have to talk about how we enlarge the pie.
And enlarging that pie in order to keep the social welfare system intact can only be done if we start thinking about the future revenue model of the Netherlands.
I like thinking like that. To think through that real challenge and see what the solution is at a larger level, at a higher level.
Jeroen: Is there something important we’ve missed today that you wanted to mention, that was in the back of your mind when you drove up here? You thought: “I’m going to share that”, and you missed it. Did we cover it all?
Ralph: Covered it all.
Jeroen: Thank you so much, Ralph Hamers, for taking a lot of time to talk to Leaders in Finance, to talk to me. Normally, I tend to say I’m the first listener. In this case, there are quite a lot more.
I hope everyone enjoyed it. I did, very much. There are a lot of learnings in what you said. You gave a lot of practical examples as well, apart from the more general view.
Thank you so much for coming to the Netherlands. I know you have quite some books with you, but I’m sure that after this podcast, the general manager of the Dutch Banking Association will say something about that to the audience.
Talking about books, I have had the privilege so far to interview 200—and I think you’re the 212th CEO or something—for the Leaders in Finance podcast. We’ve put the personal stories of the people into two books, the first 200. I have them both with me for you.
Again, thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate you doing that. I would love to ask the audience for a round of applause. Thank you so much.
Ralph: You’re welcome.
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