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No friend of big deals: ING boss Steven van Rijswijk
does not believe in cross-border takeovers like that of Commerzbank as long as the EU banking union is not completed.
Photo: Marieke van der Velden/ ING
Stevan van Rijswijk (51) has been at the helm of ING for a year and a half.
He has gone into reverse at the major Dutch bank.
Where ING cannot grow profitably, it withdraws.
Last year these were the private customer markets in the Czech Republic, Austria and France.
And otherwise, the successor to Ralph Hamers (55), who joined the Swiss UBS as CEO, advocates restraint - a lesson from the Wirecard scandal, as van Rijswijk told manager magazin on the sidelines of a conference.
manager magazin: Mr. van Rijswijk, since ING lost 200 million euros due to the bankruptcy of Wirecard, you warn your employees against being too enthusiastic about lending. Where do you currently see this danger?
Steven van Rijswijk:
Above all, I warn against lending to sectors and companies that you don't really understand, but that you might be enthusiastic about because they are currently showing impressive growth rates like Wirecard did back then.
The first rule of lending is you have to understand what's happening in the industry you're putting money into.
Wirecard pretended to make big profits, especially in business with Asian partner companies, which turned out to be a bluff.
I agree.
And we didn't screen the area well enough.
But sometimes you make mistakes, you just have to be able to learn from them.
Does that mean you no longer lend to companies in the payments industry that have a slightly more complex business model?
No, but it means that we have to take a very close look, especially in new industries that are changing quickly, and build up a lot of expertise.
We generally avoid the cryptocurrency sector.
It's an area that we don't fully understand and so we should be careful.
It's a very volatile business, a business where you can lose large sums of money quickly.
This sector is not regulated and the way in which Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies are mined, i.e. the so-called mining, is very opaque.
At this point, however, you have to differentiate between cryptocurrencies and the blockchain.
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