ING Belgium is asking external consultants which work on contract to temporarily lower their rates and to send employees on five weeks vacation. It was reported by De Tijd on Wednesday.
The measures taken in the aftermath of the corona crisis have an impact on some 700 external contract workers. Nevertheless, the fear of further layoffs at the bank has not subsided, it sounds.
The Belgian central bank recently spoke out against ambitious plans by ING that should lead to an integration of the IT environments of ING Netherlands and ING Belgium on one shared platform. The National Bank of Belgium feared, among other things, that a national contact point would disappear. It has some negative impact though: people did not always understand each other culturally.
For the unsuspecting Belgian and Dutch consumer, the outside looks like one and the same bank, with the same orange lion as the characteristic logo. Behind the scenes it turns out that this is certainly not the case. Take, for example, the number of bank branches in Belgium alone, which, at around 600, is three times higher than in the Netherlands, while ING in Belgium serves about a third of the number of customers and employs only half of the number of employees, compared to the Netherlands.
