Will ING deal bear fruit for Scotiabank?
High-interest savings firm adopts Tangerine as new moniker
Staid corporate names are the norm in Canadian banking, but that’s about to change.
How about a bank called Tangerine?
The fruit of months of research and debate, it’s the new name for the Canadian operations of ING Direct, sold to Scotiabank 16 months ago by ING’s Netherlands-based parent in a $3.1-billion deal.
A change of name and “visual identity” was a condition of the deal and that will happen next month.
“Yes, it’s different. Yes, it’s distinctive. But that’s what we are, what we continue to be. I think people will get it and appreciate it. They connect us with orange,” said ING Direct Canada chief executive Peter Aceto in an interview at the company’s brightly decorated café in downtown Montreal, where clients who don’t want to bank online at work can come and use secure in-house computers.
ING has been in Canada since 1997 and is perhaps best known for the TV commercials where Dutch actor Frederik Percy de Groot urged Canadians to “save your money.”
“Frederik has not done anything for us in three years,” Aceto said, “but he came in for an event (last fall in Toronto) and people were excited to see him. You might say he helped pass the baton.”
Aceto, who was the eighth employee hired when ING first came to Canada and has been CEO for five years, said he had some trepidation initially about what the Sco- tiabank deal might mean for the business, but that’s dissipated.
There wasn’t a lot of customer overlap between the two to begin with and operations and cultures will remain distinct, he said. ING won’t be selling Scotiabank mutual funds, for instance.
“Orange is orange, red is red,” Aceto said.
“Right from the outset, they made it clear they don’t want to influence us or change our culture. They see us as a growth opportunity.”
The only noticeable difference for ING clients is that they’ll be directed to Scotiabank automatic-banking machines rather than the current Exchange network for their free transactions, but that will actually increase the number of ABMs available to them, he said.
A virtual bank that operates without branches, ING Direct has about 1.9 million Canadian clients, 450,000 of them in Quebec.
“It’s been our biggest growth market in the last five years … 60 per cent versus 30 per cent for the rest of Canada,” Aceto said. Known initially as a savings bank with higher interest rates than Canada’s biggest players, ING Direct has evolved into a diversified institution with services such as free chequing and low-fee mutual funds.
“Canadians aren’t getting paid for savings like they were 10 years ago, but they still need to save money, and we offer different ways for them to do that,” Aceto said.