Crossing borders with Web Components
It is ING’s goal to unite the banks in all the over 40 countries where we are active. We aim at achieving a single and superior experience for all our customers worldwide. In order to unite, we are building a leading European banking platform.
Technology is one of the fields where there is an ever-closer cooperation between Belgium and the Netherlands. ING’s cross-border tech teams are working on one integrated banking platform to serve 11 million retail banking customers and 17 million prospects in both countries. An important milestone is about to be reached: all our retail customers in Belgium and the Netherlands will be on the same digital channels and will thus experience ‘One ING’.
One bank across the globe
But our ambitions reach further. The next steps are OneApp and OneWeb for all retail customers in the Netherlands and Belgium, a shared assisted channels platform and harmonisation of all banking products across the two countries. And if we look even more ahead: ING’s goal is to become a bank that works the same all across the globe. That means that we aim to unify all of the 40 countries we are present in, and use the same IT solutions worldwide.
Standardising in front-end development
A powerful start to attain this goal has already been made by the choice for working with
Web Components. Web Components are a set of web platform APIs that allow developers to create new custom, reusable, encapsulated HTML tags for use in web pages and web apps.
In this webinar via Tweakers.com (the largest technology website in the Netherlands and Belgium) tech lead Bob Bijvoet and front-end developer Lars den Bakker talk about how they use Web Components technology in front-end development at ING and about how Web Components is being rolled out to more countries. The ambition is to eventually scale Web Components worldwide, to ‘our’ 40 countries.
It all started Down Under
Speaking of international collaboration: it was ING Australia who started using Web Components. Dutch IT engineers were convinced by the results of the Australian colleagues and adopted it, a few years ago. At the time, Web Components was far from being a mature solution. Since then, it has grown fast and became standard in any browser.
Contribution from inside and outside ING
Though the cross-border development teams first focus on serving the Dutch and Belgian customers, they ship their code at an international scale, inside ING. Development teams from all 40 countries are involved in discussing and sharing architecture, sharing code and standardising ways of working. All teams are free to contribute to and pick from the Web Components library, as long as they stick to the global design guidelines and global style sheets, and the set of UX elements that are standardized for the whole organisation. External parties are invited to contribute too - ING’s Web Component library is partly open source and available on software development platform Git Hub.
Making customers happy
The single team working on Web Components a few years ago, has grown to a community of 40 multi-disciplinary feature teams within ING, including front-end and back-end developers, UX specialists, data analysts and people from the business. In their agile way of working, the teams are end-to-end responsible for the entire life cycle of a feature. Together they work towards the worldwide scaling of Web Components, with standardized solutions all across the globe. The ultimate goal? Making and keeping our customers worldwide happy.
Watch the full webinar on Vimeo
About Bob
Bob started programming when he was twelve and the magic of code has never left him. He studied Media & Entertainment Management but didn’t complete the course. He did nevertheless complete an internship at Endemol. He worked among other things on the online versions of major game shows. At the advertising agency where he subsequently worked he programmed creative campaigns for major consumer brands. Bob lives with his wife in Amsterdam East, cycles to work every day and devotes a lot of time to making music with his collection of synthesisers: previously hiphop, and now electronic music. Power yoga is his sport, and long-distance travel is another of his passions.