Ionelia Zidaru

Walk us through your career path in ING (from your first role to the current one)

My first role in ING started 9 years ago in the Management Trainee Programme; I was a trainee for 2 years. Being part of this programme, I got the opportunity to learn about each department’s activity, both from Retail and Wholesale Banking.

The following 5 years I was part of the Credit Risk team as an analyst (both for the Risk Intelligence and Credit Risk Policy). This was the mysterious area in ING :-)

I’ve learnt a lot in that period of time and a question kept popped into my mind "how is our activity seen from outside ING?” So I moved to the business area of the organisation as a Business Strategy Manger in the Loans Strategy team.

And since 2016, I coordinate the Business Intelligence team from the Customer Intelligence Department. Now I consolidate the business experience with the risk experience I previously got. The thing I love most here is that we can observe the impact of our strategies directly on our clients.

How it Life @ ING? (especially from a learning experience point of view)

It is very challenging to pick only one example (from a learning point of view), one from all the projects I have been part in the last 9 years.

But I think that the biggest challenge was to develop the Business Intelligence team, because this was a new team in ING with all the fresh aspects. So I had to manage the recruitment tasks, the ones that were related to our way of working and also the ones related to the department positioning inside the organization.

Now, the greatest achievement is to look at how we have grown together as a team.

How would you explain your role as a Manager Business Intelligence to a 7-year-old?

Imagine you are at school, enjoying the break with your colleagues. So you play a game: you have to divide your colleagues in 3 categories taking into account 3 criterion that only you can determine. Depending on the benchmark you chose, you can win or lose the game.   

So I help my colleagues determine those criterion they have to apply when dividing the ING customers into different segments.  

If you were to recommend ING to a friend, what would you say about the organisation?

I can describe ING in 5 words:

• dynamic
• feedback
• proactive
• challenging
• enthusiastic 

If you were to save the world with an app…

To save it from what? :-) In my opinion, the world does not have to get saved from anything.

Let’s say you wrote your first SF book. What would you call it?

Green