Screening clients for so-called Customer Due Diligence has top priority at ING. But how to separate the good clients and transactions from the bad? Aiming to ‘Know Your Customer’ ING is on the hunt for people with specific skills sets. Managing Consultant Stefania Contu (ING Global Risk) tells us.
Stefania: “With innovation and technology enabling boundaryless direct banking we don’t meet our customers in person any more. Knowing your customer in a digital landscape gives new challenges but also provides new opportunities. We do not only have to collect basic information, but also thoroughly understand customers’ behaviour and redesign processes to make them fit for purpose. It’s up to us to retrieve the right information: to serve and protect our customer and ensure ING is fully safe and compliant.”
“Customer Due Diligence information comprises the facts about a customer that should enable an organisation to assess the extent to which the customer exposes it to a range of risks. Organisations need to know their customers for a number of reasons, amongst which are compliance with the requirements of relevant legislation and regulation, avoiding fraud, including impersonation and identity theft, and informing on customers being investigated following the making of a suspicious report.”
Creating trust
“KYC is an ongoing process, where we do our utmost to fulfil the mandate the diverse stakeholders have given us. It’s a timely and accurate completion where each stakeholder has his own needs, and that can result in challenging discussions. Of course, the customer needs to come first, as well as the compliancy bodies, whose rules and regulations we have to respect, audit organizations and the ING business lines. All overruled by regulators that are helping us to monitor. We are a spider in this fascinating web, meeting both law requirements and customer needs – creating trust.”
On a mission
“For me this is a mission and I work hard to achieve it. Having many years of operational experience in an international setting, I truly understand what people are talking about and what certain decisions imply for a local community. Setting a certain service level has different complications for different places, and you have to understand those to write the right documents and design the right processes. At ING I can make other people aware of this impact by sharing my experience and empowering my team to be successful in their job. Together we are setting the standards. We are making a powerful fist for over 30 million people in the world.”
“I’d love equally passionate people to join our team. We are looking for modest, but ambitious people who know their numbers, but have a practical fact-based approach. People who dare to question the status quo, have a change mind-set and an eye for improvements. Expertise in finance is important, but the experts we are looking for have to be resilient too. Dealing with all the requirements in an international environment, making decisions for millions of people, isn’t just something!”
About Stefania
At the start of her career Italian Stefania joined a traditional bank by chance. Once the chance arose in 2000 she joined the launch of ING Italy, in a start-up like environment. After climbing up in the organization, in 2017 Stefania moved to Amsterdam to help growing the Global Risk team, with the complicated but fascinating task of Customer Activity Monitoring.