ING rebuilds its bank around Spotify-style squads — 3,500 HQ staff, everyone reapplies

By 2015 ING Netherlands was profitable with a strong market position, but customer behaviour was shifting to digital channels and expectations were set by tech firms, not banks. COO Bart Schlatmann's team concluded the old structure — silos, steering committees, project handovers — could never deliver a seamless customer journey, so in June 2015 they reorganized headquarters around the squad-and-tribe model they studied at Spotify, Google and Netflix.

Stop steering a bank through departments and approval layers: rebuild it as multidisciplinary squads grouped into tribes that each own a customer journey end to end.

In January 2015 all 3,500 HQ employees were put on 'mobility' and invited to reapply; roughly 2,500 were selected, with culture weighted over knowledge, and about 40 percent changed roles. Squads of marketing, product, UX, data and IT staff took over customer journeys; release cadence went from five to six big launches a year to every two to three weeks. Supporting mechanisms were borrowed openly: self-steering teams in call centres from Zappos, peer-to-peer hiring from Google, quarterly business reviews from Google and Netflix.

Implementation took eight to nine months across the whole HQ. By late 2016 Schlatmann reported customer-satisfaction and employee-engagement scores up multiple points, fewer handovers, and ING positioned as the Netherlands' number-one mobile bank; INSEAD was engaged to verify the metrics independently. The transformation became the standard case study for agile beyond software teams.

In June 2015, ING Netherlands did something banks don't do when things are going well: it reorganized its entire 3,500-person headquarters around squads and tribes, the structure made famous by Spotify. Squads mix marketers, product managers, UX designers, data analysts and IT engineers around one customer journey, with no managers controlling handovers between functions; tribes group squads that need to align.

The mechanism that made it real was uncomfortable. In January 2015 every HQ employee was told their job was gone and they could reapply for the new organization. Of roughly 2,500 selected, nearly 40 percent ended up in different positions; hiring weighted mind-set over knowledge, and managers lost the old currency of headcount and project size. The whole build took eight to nine months from vision to implementation.

The results ING reported in October 2016: software releases every two to three weeks instead of five or six big launches a year, customer-satisfaction and employee-engagement up multiple points, and the number-one mobile-bank position in the Netherlands. McKinsey's Quarterly published the insiders' account in 2017, and the ING model became the reference point for banks and insurers attempting the same move.

Customer journeys crossed department lines, so only an end-to-end team could own them; the old structure guaranteed handover delays at every seam.

Starting from tech companies rather than other banks gave ING a working model to copy instead of a concept to invent.

Putting everyone on mobility made the change irreversible and even — no one was demoted out of a hierarchy that no longer existed.

Borrowed mechanisms (Zappos teams, Google hiring, Netflix QBRs) came pre-tested, reducing the risk of redesigning everything at once.

Structure, not sentiment, changes behaviour: keep approval layers while preaching empowerment and people keep waiting. Go all-in or don't start — cherry-picking agile defeats the purpose.

ING's home-market model became one of the most-studied corporate transformations of the decade, taught at business schools and cited in nearly every 'agile at scale' program. The quarterly business reviews, peer hiring and squad structure ING described in 2016 persisted and spread to other ING country operations, and competitors from ABN AMRO to insurers ran copycat programs. Schlatmann left ING in January 2017 after 22 years; the organization he described kept iterating, treating transformation as a permanent state rather than a project.