00:00:02

My name is me. Hi, and today alongside with my colleagues, Mihai Yami high is a popular name in our country. And George, we are going to try to tell you a story of what we have achieved in the last three years, uh, in our company. Um, basically three years ago, our CEO came to the, um, does London and shared with you or with the people who went to London, shared the plans about this transformation, about how we wanted to move from a traditional brick and mortar bank to a real tech company? Well, the story is that we didn't really achieve to be a tech company like Google is, but we did very, very good steps in that direction. Um, listen to the story and try to take away with you at home, the, the good things, and also the hiccups that we have, that this is not a story in which we tell how smart we are and how good things we did.

00:00:58

We just try to share with you our experiences and our knowledge and everything that we did in these three years, so that your life would be easier from today onwards. If you also want to do such a transformation. So again, if you're, if you want to, to see or to hear a great story, I don't think it will be a great story. I think it will be a good story. We just want to, to, to share some teachings with you, um, a couple of things about, about ourselves. So we are coming from Romania, Romania. It's a country in Eastern Europe, bordering the black seat. Um, it's roughly as big as the state of Idaho, and it has a population of 20 million people, um, now about ourselves. So my name is Mihai Papa. I'm the head of a department which builds software for our engineers in ING.

00:01:51

Um, this is pretty rare for a bank because usually banks don't invest in software and stuff like that. Now, now we're just starting. So basically my department builds, um, software for all the engineers in the bank for people in the audience who tried to sell me something. This is not a good news because I'm not going to buy the product. I'm usually going to try to, uh, build them in house. Um, my, uh, my background is in computer science and currently I'm doing an executive MBA at Erasmus university in Rotterdam, my colleague, George he's the chapter lead. And we'll tell you a little bit later about what chapter leaders for the ops engineers. He, um, he works in fraud and cybersecurity and he already graduated an MBA. So he's more advanced than me and we, hi, he's the chapter is the chapter lead for engineers.

00:02:40

He's a very passionate developer, more than eight years of experience in software development, mainly in Java. Um, and the three of us will try to share with you how we felt and what we've learned from this transformation. Um, if I would be to tell you about what I'm doing in my day, day, life at work is, is I use this metaphor. So I like to say that I'm the coach of a basketball team, composed of orange science. Um, of course you might say, this is just a metaphor. Well, if you want to reduce it to something simple, as I'm a people manager, right, I'm doing people management, I'm working on, on strategy, on motivation and stuff like that. If you would ask, what's the difference between what I'm doing and what they are doing. They are more focusing on software engineering on software engineers, and they are trying to develop the skills of a software engineer.

00:03:29

Whereas myself, I'm trying to focus more on the strategy, more on the, on the planning, on the communication. And let's say on the, on the people aspect, um, a couple of words about our company, I and G is a medium-sized bank. It's a Dutch bank. Uh, we have roughly 38 million active customers. Um, we are like 50 we're on 50, 50 or 60,000 employees all over the world. Um, the, um, the company has four segments market leaders in the Benelux area. We have the growth markets in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, the challengers and the wholesale banking. So you can see that two are present all over the world except Africa. Um, is there any one from Canada here? Great. So some of you may have heard in Canada about ING. We have sold our stake to Tangerine, which I think still today is still the orange bank in, in Canada.

00:04:26

So we were present in Canada, in the states who are present only in, um, in wholesale banking. Um, now what we try to do at our NGS to, uh, to empower people, to stay a step ahead in, in business and in life. And we try, we have tried to do this in, in the, in the last years through different ways. This transformation itself is the living, the living proof that we are trying to do to do this. Now in the next slides, Mihai will tell you how, uh, we moved from the brick and mortar bank to more of an agile organization,

00:05:05

As I mentioned, yeah, we are a bank. So we had to deal with, uh, people finance and that's coming with, uh, with a lot of risk and compliance points that we have to, we have to cover if we focus now on how we're building software, if we look and, and more years ago, yeah, we're doing kind of the same as everybody we're running in a, in a waterfall way. That's okay. It also working except that we had, uh, time to market, which was too big. It was too big. For example, there are parts, um, parts of our, um, web, which had only four releases per year. And you can imagine what happened if one of them failed. So we had a lot of pressure on ourself from inside the company that we had to change something. It was not only the company, so the pressure from inside, but we looked outside.

00:05:59

So yeah, let's talk about unicorn. So will we have a lot of fintechs unicorns, which are delivering similar services with what we deliver in banking, but they are doing it faster. Yeah. They have a good reason for which they are doing it faster. They had no legacy behind them. So for them it was something freshly new. So putting these two things together, we've decided that we need to change. So as our CIO mission in London, uh, it started in 2010 and it started at the mobile app. So we had to do, um, a change. We had to make impact on mobile. Everybody. These days is spending hours and even days from their mobile. So we started with two teams, which are purely doing agile development. That does amazing for them. But soon enough, we had hit the first, uh, let's say the first call we had the dev team, but we still had operations separate. We had to put this, um, these two silos inside the it organization to get there. So you can imagine, yeah, we've moved to DevOps. So we put engineers together. So we had to re we removed the transition, the handover. So any kind of handover it was needed, it was gun that came with also other benefits. I will, I will mention them a little bit later.

00:07:30

Good. Now we have all it IQ organization split it in teams where they can do everything from the first line of code deal production. But we still have two silos in the company who had the business, which was demanding to it saying, we need this new functionality and we need it now. And then it had to deliver it to, to be in time with that. So we went one step further. Maybe some of you heard about Spotify, took their model, how they are working. So we we've adapted. So it's not just coping directly their model because that doesn't work is not doing the copy paste. Usually it's, it's going wrong somewhere is going to go wrong. So we've created two, we split organization in tribes, uh, which they have a single business purpose. For example, if you look at the mortgages, we have one tribe which is dealing with Mo mortgages inside the tribe. There are several squads which are helping to deliver that. Um, that value, I mean, I mentioned in the beginning about us as we are chapter leads, we are chapter leads. So we, they care about people, but we are also engineers. So we have part of our time, we are a normal member of a squad.

00:08:51

It's it's, it's, it's looking a little bit different as the squads will not stay in the same formula with the same members for more than 12 or 18 months. So we, we change the people, uh, in order to deliver faster, uh, the business value that we want. So I'm dealing with, uh, with, uh, dev engineer. So I'm one of the transporters lines there. So I have all my engine, all the dev engineers in my tribe are, are working with me, same it's for George on the, on the operations. So to sit a little bit further, we had to do something for the engineer. So we had to encourage them to develop more and to become better. So we went to the, to the drivers model. If you remember, in the past, we had the, a junior engineer, we had the G uh, medium engineer, and then we had the senior engineer, or even an expert in, uh, in some companies, what is done is translated the three levels in five.

00:09:51

And we are not looking only at technical skills, but we mainly look at observable behaviors. I'm going to take a short example on the novice one. You can make the link with a freshly graduated students. So it's someone that can deliver value, but he needs coaching and he needs help. We have done a lot of things. So we've moved from waterfall. We, we switched to the, uh, to a job to DevOps. And then we, the Dreyfus, all of this, we have done in order to be able that tomorrow we built one ING, which has one experience and one foundation. Now, Georgia, tell us a little bit more in detail, what we have done to achieve this.

00:10:40

Now, we're going time before I'm going to dive into the top topic. I'll go back a bit to the, to Spotify. Because as we know, Spotify doesn't have one Spotify, Mexico, one Spotify, Germany, and one Spotify, Japan. They have one platform which serves all the world. And of course, based on the region, you're in, you're going to have different options and different settings. And now going back to our goals. So we were going, we are going towards, um, rolling out one platform, one global platform. And the steps that we took, uh, to go in that direction were first, as we saw earlier, we implemented the drivers model, which means that now we have one set of skills and behaviors for our ops and dev engineers. We also implemented one assessment model, which means that instead of only me having an opinion about my engineers, Mihai has an opinion.

00:11:31

Then there are other peers that are having their own opinion. And at the end of the day, we're going to have a quite accurate assessment for our colleague. But in order to achieve all this big transformations, we also had to lay a bit at the foundation and to give the tools to the people. And in order to do that, we deployed one single, uh, learning platform. And basically this helped because during all these transitions, there were people that needed different sets of skills, and we were providing their trainings and courses that help them achieve the goal and all this going towards our idea to have the global one platform. And we started small, we started with Belgium and Netherlands, and now with all the projects that are, that are coming and all the projects that we're thinking of me off in the future, we are thinking to go global.

00:12:21

So everything, the mentality is going global to one platform. And of course, during all this transformation. So Y uh, during all these transformations, we had many challenges, and I'm going to discuss a bit with you about the general challenges that we encountered. Um, and then we're going to dive a bit in the continuous challenges, and then explain a bit what are the challenges that we face the chapter leads and the challenges that are the management of faces. So now going through the challenges, the general challenges, as we saw yesterday in many presentations, the main challenge that we faced during such a major transformation is communication. Communicate, communicate, communicate, and in order to achieve a good communication, you need to first be transparent with the people and be clear in the message that you're sending. Because otherwise, if you leave space for interpretation, this will probably bounce back to you and your organization in a very toxic way. And for us, a big challenge was also to change the mentality of the people we had to explain to them that it's okay to fail. We're going to give you space to try things, to fail, to learn from it. And like that we advanced together and going back a bit to the people. We are a people company, and we work for people. We work for our customers.

00:13:43

And for this, I'm going quickly to the challenges that we have, the continuous challenges that we're facing. We had business and idea. And yesterday we had a very nice presentation by the us customs and immigration office, which explained perfectly the situation and the relationship between business and it. And we had many challenges here. And with this mind shift that we tried to implement during this transformation, we made the people understand that unless it and business work together, we will not be able to achieve a safer compliant bank while delivering new features and better products for our customers. And now I will go back to the people we are currently having around 15,000 engineers, which means that one out of three of our employees is an engineer, and they are serving, as I mentioned earlier, around 38 million customers that trust us every day. And here there is a big challenge because we need to keep all these engineers entertained and able to deliver great products.

00:14:51

And for this we're doing what most of the it companies are doing these days. So we're organizing hackathons like the one in that you can see in the picture, we're organizing many internal conferences. We have different events to which we invite. We invite people that are coming from other companies like Google and Microsoft. And we also organize smaller events that are more focused at squad level or at multiple squad level. Like for example, a pizza day to solve different issues or different drinks and different team buildings, more squad and tribe level. And now I'll explain a bit, what are the challenges for us as chapter is because it's quite an interesting and quite important to understand what is the chapter redraw. So in the past, before this transformation occurred, we had people managers and we had the engineers. And all of the sudden at the point, some of these people became chapter leads.

00:15:42

What does the chapter lead mean? It means that you are part of the people manager and part engineer. And the challenge here was that, of course, depending on their background, these people had some skills that were missing or were not properly developed. And in order to address this, we did several things. We started with the platform that I showed you earlier, where they could address the skills and register for courses and trainings to address the skills that they needed to develop. The second one was the support of the management. For example, Mihai, he supported his chapter leads in developing the skills that they needed. And if his chapter has had some issues, if he didn't have the answer, because of course he doesn't have everything he knew to whom to point them to get the right answer. And another big challenge that we are facing, and all the management is facing right now is that we live in a VUCA world. Does anyone know what VUCA stands for? No.

00:16:44

Some of you

00:16:46

Okay. Maybe Mihai,

00:16:47

No, this is, this is like, this is like that trick where you would try to make me look bad on the stage. It comes up. No, because we did that with written here. It's not written there and we didn't, we didn't talk about it before. So it comes from a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, complex, and ambiguous. Don't do that next time. It's a, sorry. I'll keep that in mind.

00:17:13

Just testing. Okay. So what does it mean? It means that we're living in a very fast world. So if you look in life and in business, things are moving very fast and in order to keep up the peace and to take proper decisions, we often don't, don't see the whole puzzle. We're just going to have a few, a few pieces and we need to take a decision. And this is very challenging. And at least for us, it's very interesting. And we enjoy living in this world because it forces us to develop in order to get new skills and in order to have better, a better decision to make better decisions in the future. And, um, just to explain a bit, this slide. So during all this transformation, ING was like this boat. So we are all inside. It is, it still is. Yeah, it still is. We were in this boat and we had one goal. And now our goal is to go towards one global platform and we don't really know how the boat is going to go, but we know that unless we work together, we're not going to reach there. And now we're going to, uh, I'm going to leave me high to explain a bit how it was for the managers of the managers.

00:18:21

Yeah, I do have the click. Okay. So yeah. What about, what about the, the leader? So when we started this transformation, I was, um, promoted from chapter lead to, uh, let's say the, the manager of managers. And, um, I was asking myself, so what's my role from now on. Now everybody's talking about flat organizations. We don't need management and self-organizing teams. And I was like, what am I going to do? And I had the last three years, basically for me, where I have to find my way I went to conferences. I read a lot of articles on internet, but nobody was really telling what, because I think nobody knows what an engineering manager should do for them. It's simple. They go and they code, and there are also the, the, the, the, the time they just do people management. Yeah. But what about the above level?

00:19:08

Um, so then I came up with, with a couple of things during this, this, so I did an introspection and doing these three, three years, I came up with a couple of things that I'm going to share with you here on the side. So we, we mentioned about it's okay to fail. I always support my chapter, leads my direct reports to support their people to fail. I know it's very difficult to do because everybody fights here in this room for market share. But if we don't give space to engineers to try to innovate and to express themselves, we're not going to move forward. Um, I do mentorship, uh, as he said, I'm trying to, I'm trying to help my chapter leads with the knowledge that I have to get, to get them out of difficult situation, mainly on people management, the third thing I'm trying to do coaching.

00:19:50

Um, the thing that we don't do as human beings is asking questions and listening. We tend only to say, yeah, I know that you have to do this because I did it before. I think it's more meaningful. If you ask questions in, if you make that person understand which way he should, he, or she should go, um, I'm an ambassador of my department. So I just told you proudly that my people are building software for the bank. I'm very proud of that. And I don't think we're doing it so often. Usually we don't talk so, so nice about our departments or, or this is what it's, where it's happening in our company. Uh, and last but not least, we don't celebrate the achievements. I don't know how many of you do parties. We generally say, yeah, but this is normal. No, it's not normal when we do something good, we should be proud of it.

00:20:34

We should be happy and we should support the engineers that they did that thing. Yeah. Um, and as a manager, I thought it's good to do, to do those, those things. I also try to help the chapter list to make sure that the teams are coherent because let's face it for the basketball falls fans. If, um, Chicago bulls would have been made only of Michael Jordan, I don't think they would have won everything that they want. Sometimes we need the Dennis Rodman there. Right. Um, and, or, or, or other types of flares. And then I asked myself, how can we achieve all the things that I've just said to you? Um, I think the most important thing is to get to know every member of your team. So I have a department of 70 people. Um, and one of them is really in this room, um, that will cover, I do know a couple of things about himself.

00:21:22

Yeah. I know a couple of things about themselves as well. It's not, I'm not faking it, so I know what they like and what they dislike, because this is how we build trust and how we improve the communication. And I know that maybe you have heard it before, but this is the reality. This is how it works. If you know your people, you're going to get more successful, successful in solving their problems. Um, and now I'm getting to the last point of do not take everything at face value. So whenever there is a conflict between two people, if, for example, if they have a conflict, because I do not do know them very well, I will be able to tell what the real problem is because of course I will have different stories right. From, from, from both of them. But because I know them very well, I can solve that or I can help them to solve the conflict more easier.

00:22:06

Um, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna basically finish, finish my introspection with the, the things that I think that any leader should have in a software software company. Some, again, some of them, you have read them in books. Some of them you have heard, we have heard on different other stocks, but this is what I think that after three years of doing this transformation, we need to have as a, as a, as a people manager or as a leader of a company, um, I'm going to take just three of them to talk about. Um, I truly believe that emotional intelligence is important. You see that many, many times we have discussions. And even now, when I'm talking to you, I'm able to see who is interested in, who is not interested in my talk. Now don't, don't pretend that you are interested in now that I told you, but, uh, it's very important when, when you, when you go into a meeting to look around at people around the table and see what are their agendas and how they behave based on their, um, non-linguistic, um, behavior, if I can say, so, um, you have to lead by example.

00:23:10

Yeah. Walk the talk. Don't just say to your teams, do this. If you're not doing it, you'd better. Not just not say it. It's fine. And I think last but not least is have courage as a courage, as a, as a management, as a manager, you have to have the courage to the performance management. Whenever somebody in your teams or somebody in their teams is not behaving. As we, as management decided they should behave. We should talk about that. We should tell them we should give feedback and we should help them. Not just fire them up. We should help them to, to go in the direction in which we want, because sometimes people don't go in the direction where we want is because they don't understand the objectives. They don't understand the vision of the company. They don't understand the transformation. George talked about communication, so we have to help them. And we have to have the courage to talk to them about these things. We've talked a lot about people and how we felt it as a transform, how we felt this transformation, but now I'm going to, let me have you tell us a bit about the technical, the technical part. What did we achieve industry years?

00:24:15

It's, it's an achievement of our entire engineering community. So we managed to end up with a clear set of tools and technologies that we use in, uh, in the company. Uh, yeah, the next two may sound a little bit weird for some of you, but yeah, now we have one version control and one pipeline, one CICB pipeline. Uh, when we mentioned about one, we're talking ING global attention groups. So in all countries they can make use, uh, make use of it. Yeah. I'm still an engineer. So the last two are representing myself quite well. I want to keep things simple. I don't want to have to do the same work in three places, or even more than that. And honestly, I hate to do repetitive tasks. So we've, we've agreed all of them. And all the engineers came with that. If I'm doing something more than two times or three times in a certain period of time, we need to get rid of it. We need to make it faster and to make it automated in the end.

00:25:16

Just a small comment on this one. Again, if you are working in a software company for you, this, all these things are normal. We are a bank. We are highly regulated. We have to justify every single step that we have to do. So this is, this is why we're so proud of with these things, because we couldn't just do these things without having the, uh, acceptance of the ECB, the European central bank. For example,

00:25:38

We've talked about our engineer community, but let's see a little bit, uh, what we have we managed to achieve also for our customers, because it was not only about transforming a bank into a tech company. So somewhere before, um, this transformation, we're talking about like 90 designs for our cards, we going globally. We've reduced that to only eight designs at this moment. Uh, then we we've improved our existing services is not only just delivering new services and new functionalities. It's improving the existing ones. Why we have done that. We have only in Belgium, in the Netherlands 7 million of interactions with our customers per day. So that means that we have 7 million chances to deliver a better service, a proper service, or we may fail a little bit. So the chances are big. So we paid a lot of attention there. Uh, some things that we would receive and we're proud from, uh, from outside of ING. Uh, last year we were named, uh, one of the best banks in the world, and we're doing something more than just banking and finance, uh, where investing also in new technologies and we support others to grow. For example, Angie has a nice, uh, thing that village where literally we use, we help the startups to grow and to become bigger and better. Uh, that was for me, I will let Georgia conclude the

00:27:13

Yes. Before we wrap this up, or we just want to give you some key takeaways that you can bring back to your companies. First one is fail fast, learn faster. This sounds quite cliche, but it's actually not. You really need to give space to your engineers, let them try things, let them fail, let them learn from it. And that they can evolve together with you. The journey is not easy, doing, doing such a major transformation. It's not easy, but you need to bring everyone in the boat. As we saw earlier, you need to keep getting better and better. You need to empower your employees and you should not wait too long, because if you do, you might not have too many chances until you become irrelevant and conducting such a major change, such a major transformation. It's not easy to do, but unless you make everyone understand from individual to teams to the company level, that unless you do this, you will not be relevant in the future. And just to con, just to finish with, uh, one slide about ING, we strongly believe that at this point, we are becoming more and more a tech company with a banking license. And with this presentation we wanted to, as mentioned earlier, we wanted to continue what our CIO presented to you three years ago at those London. And with this, we would like to thank you. And if you have any questions we're open for you on slack or after a session

00:28:41

Very much.