Would You Like a Mortgage With Your Mocha?

There are also the inevitable snafus: When the meeting took place, a test program to encourage financial advisers to open 25,000 new ING Direct savings accounts for their customers was falling 3,000 accounts short of its goal for 2002. (By the end of December, though, the goal was surpassed by 500 accounts.) Otherwise, ING Direct executives say that they are exceeding their five high-level targets: total assets; operating expenses as a percentage of assets; call-center service level; net number of savings accounts opened; and number of other accounts opened, such as CDs or mortgages.

That will free up the team to work on new initiatives. The E-First program will nudge customers toward receiving all of their correspondence electronically, from tax statements to mortgage correspondence. A plan is under consideration to offer term life insurance, fixed annuities, and title insurance for mortgage holders. Finally, there's a project that aims to "reengineer home mortgages so that they're cheaper and simpler," according to Kuhlmann. "You shouldn't have to buy a book to learn how to borrow money for your house."

Kuhlmann's intention is to keep chiseling away at the industry's engraved-in-marble assumptions about how banking works. "You can't do meaningful things without passion and a powerful idea about what you're trying to do," he says.

But Kuhlmann is also aware that at some point, he'll have to put down the chisel and let ING Direct stabilize, focusing on consistency rather than on radical change. "The question we'll want to ask is, Did the ING Direct wave in the marketplace create some trends and changes that left people better off than they were before?" Kuhlmann says. "If the answer is yes, and we did manage to push the envelope, then everyone here will carry that success with them for a long time."

Sidebar: Banking on the Web

Plenty of banks have tried to turn the Web into a channel that works. Too often, they have ended up with sites that were too complex -- the digital equivalent of standing in line at a branch. ING Direct's Web site tries to make opening a savings account, checking balances, and transferring money "as easy as using an ATM," president and CEO Arkadi Kuhlmann says. There are three core principles.

Keep it clean. "There's always a temptation to add stuff to the Web site, to load on the features," Kuhlmann says. The Web team at ING Direct resists that urge. There are no menus that pop out from behind things, no animated flash movies.

Cheaper is better. ING Direct also resists adding a "chat now" button that would link customers to the call center. Why? "Our cost model doesn't accommodate that," CTO Rudy Wolfs says. "It's a huge investment to train reps to be typists and to make sure that they respond quickly enough." This year, the company launched a modest test of a chat application in one area of the site, where it has found that users sometimes get stuck in the process of applying for a home-equity loan. If it works, ING Direct may try chatting with users elsewhere on the site.

Numbers don't lie. Internally, ING Direct tries to measure every aspect of its Web site: how long it takes reps to respond to customer emails, how long it takes each page to be sent to a user's computer, and how often users give up in the middle of a process. "Tracking stats lets you solve small problems before they turn into major problems," says Mike Florax, who oversees ING Direct's command center.

Scott Kirsner (skirsner@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company contributing editor based in Boston. Learn more about ING Direct on the Web (www.ingdirect.com).