Good afternoon, and welcome. Fantastic to see you here in person today, and also a warm welcome to our audience joining our live webcast. It's been a while. Frankfurt 2019 was the last time we had an investor update, and since then, we've learned to live with lockdowns, working from home, you're on mute has become the most used sentence in recent history. Unfortunately, we saw an end to peace in Europe. We see energy prices spiking, we see inflation rising, lack of workforce. Those elements that surround us today affect us daily and also today.
Many of you have wanted to be here, but were unable to travel because either the outgoing airport or here at Schiphol, the lack of labor was so much that we couldn't handle traffic of passengers and planes and were canceled or baggage couldn't be handled. COVID is still around us. Countries in the world are still in lockdown, and unfortunately, our Chief Financial Officer, Tanate Phutrakul, is self-isolating because of it. He will be joining us virtually today. In Frankfurt, we also talked about this great company and what we would do. Growing fees, growing primary customers, and also how we would focus our wholesale bank, and we did. Our management team will be here today to talk you through how we navigated the recent past and how we're well-positioned to navigate the future. Let me take you through the agenda.
First of all, our CEO, Steven van Rijswijk, will take you through our strategy and our priorities. He'll be followed by Ron van Kemenade, our Chief Technology Officer, and Marnix van Stiphout, our Chief Operation Officer. Then we'll have a short break, and when we return, Pinar Abay and Aris Bogdaneris will take you through our great retail franchises. They will then hand over to Andrew Bester, who is leading our wholesale bank, and he will take you through that story. Then keeping our company safe on risk, our Chief Risk Officer, Ljiljana Čortan, will expand on that. We'll wrap it up, all up with Tanate Phutrakul, our CFO, who will take you through the outlook and our ambitious targets. Now, it's my great pleasure to ask to the stage our CEO, Steven van Rijswijk. Steven, floor is yours.
Thank you very much, Mark, and welcome everybody. Today we're going to take you through a journey, and it's the ING journey. Before I do so, I first want to introduce our members of the management team, because these members are diverse, they are complementary, but they're also relatively new. We start here with Pinar. Pinar started with McKinsey a number of years ago, has joined ING 10 years ago, also as the Head of or the CEO of Turkey, and started in the management board as the Head of Market Leaders in 2020. We have Marnix. Marnix is an ING veteran, if you will. He was with us over 20 years as the CEO also of Wholesale Banking and the CEO of Retail Banking, also working on the delivery of our Ops foundations and scalability.
Next to him is Ron van Kemenade. We call them also the digital twins, the both of them. He has also been around for around 20 years, but before that, he was working in media and internet for KPN, the incumbent, the telecom incumbent in the Netherlands. He is very much being focused on developing the digital channels in this bank. We have Aris, and Aris is the nestor, if you will, of the board. He joined the board in 2015, but before that, he worked in Citi, he worked in GE Capital, and he also worked in Raiffeisen. We have Andrew, a very seasoned global banker, and he worked a lot on changing laws and transforming laws after the financial crisis.
Before that, he worked at Standard Chartered where he was the head of the Greater China and of Africa. Then we have Ljiljana Čortan, and she was before she joined ING in 2021, early 2021, just like Andrew, she was with UniCredit, where she was both working in a investment banking, corporate banking, and risk capacity. Then on the screen, we have Tanate Phutrakul, or not on the screen, but you see him there today. He has been with ING for 15 years, but he was a trained engineer, and he has been the CFO of amongst others, the C&G countries, Belgium, but also the TMT franchise before he came to the board in 2019. You see a diverse team, a complementary team, but also a young team.
Today, we will talk about three things. We will talk about how our strengths are in ING and how this contributed to delivering value over the past years. We will talk about the fact that we had learnings to do over the past years and what that meant in terms of action that we've taken. We will talk about how the strategy will also deliver value in the future for you. Because in the end, we as a team are united and we are deliberate about the fact that we want to make sure that ING will reinforce its position as the best bank in Europe, the best universal bank in Europe. We do that by focusing on the customer, by providing a superior customer experience and extending our sustainability leadership.
We do that by the fact that we focus there where we make the most impact. In retail, that means local scale. We focus there, not only in the strategy on the why and the how and on the what, but also on the how. We want to execute with discipline. You may well wonder, what are then the strengths of ING? What I'm proud of is the fact that we've always focused on the customer. Customer came first. Think of ING Direct 25 years ago. I'm proud of the fact that we have been improving the quality of our income by diversifying into our fee income over the past couple of years. I'm proud of the fact that we have been a digital leader, and that we have been working on all these technology foundations.
I'm proud of being a pioneer, and not only in digital, but also a pioneer in protecting the planet. I'm proud of how we protected our risk costs and kept our risk costs low through the cycle and our strong risk management and appetite framework. I'm mostly proud of our people. An entrepreneurial workforce that is value-based, but also has made sure that we were able to adapt to all the changes in the world. Yes, now good. That has led to the fact that we have been able to deliver strong results, not only as a bank, but also compared to our European peers. We have been able to grow our fee business in a over the past couple years, despite the fact that we had Corona.
We have been able to have resilient NII during a time whereby our liability income was under pressure. We kept our costs under control, and we have low risk costs. That, in the end, resulted in a good return on equity and attractive yields, and we're here to tell you how we also are going to deliver attractive value to you in the future. Another reason why we're able to deliver this value is because we have a strong combination of retail and wholesale banking business, and it gives two benefits. The first benefit is that it gives us diversified income because then we're able to actually diversify in terms of customers, in terms of products, in terms of geographies.
The second reason is that it also gives rise to an attractive repos/deposit base in retail, and we use that to fund our retail business, but it also supports to fund our wholesale business, where we make an attractive risk-return profile. Ljiljana Čortan will talk later about that risk-return profile and how we diversify our lending business. Also standalone, we make good returns, and we have improved returns over the past years. With that, there was a lesson that came, and the lesson was about the regulatory requirements. The regulatory requirements have been increasing over the years. I don't wanna talk about why that increase. I wanna talk about what that means for our business, because these regulatory requirements not only increased, but they also are compartmentalized.
It means compartmentalized in terms of local capital requirements, local liquidity requirements, local data requirements, but also local product requirements. That means that we need to build local scale in retail. Local scale to provide attractive customer propositions, local scale to attract the right talent, and local scale to get the right return on equity in retail. In wholesale, we don't need to have that local scale. There we can follow the clients by having a very strong network and having very strong sector knowledge. What we did there over the past couple of years, we focused there on where we have the most value for these customers in our network and in our sector strength. As a result, we condensed our network a little bit.
We moved some of the clients to some of the hubs like New York and Singapore, and we compressed also the amount of clients. We focused on a smaller number of clients. That, in turn, also meant that we were able to keep our Risk-Weighted Assets under control and manage our Risk-Weighted Assets, and that has helped the returns improving in wholesale banking. I said that I was very proud of the way that we focus on the customer, and the fact that we focus on the customer and provide a superior customer experience is absolutely key. The reason why it is key is because banking is commoditized. The way to differentiate yourself is by providing a superior experience. Here's where the second lesson comes in. A number of years ago, we embarked on multi-country, long-term business integrations.
I also relate it coming back to the regulatory compartmentalization, but these business integration turned out to be very complex. That's why we have decided to readjust and refocus our investments in that customer experience. We stopped a number of these large business integration programs, and we refocused the investments into the customer experience. In the end, what we want is that customer experience to be relevant, easy, personal, and instant, regardless of the customer segment, although we appreciate the fact that the way we deal with it in different customer segments is different. It starts with measurement, and it starts with investing and improving that customer experience, and we can do that by the support of our ops and technology foundations.
With that, we can measure and we can work on how personal we make the service, how digital we make the service, and we measure that through straight-through processing, and in the end, we also measure it through our Net Promoter Score. If we have promoters, that means in the end that we will get more customers, and we will also have more customers that do more with us. That's what we call those our primary customers. In turn, it also means that we make more fees, we get more fees, we get more lending income, and as a result of a larger customer base, our cost to serve goes down. Digital is absolutely key and instrumental to realize that superior customer experience, whether it's in private individuals, whereby we have a mobile-first approach, or whether it's in wholesale, wherever our digital is more in the back.
We learned that lesson already a number of years ago when we started to greatly build ourselves into a digital leader that we are now. It pays off. It pays off because we currently have more than half of our customers that only work with us through the mobile and nothing else. It paid off during the pandemic, because during the pandemic, we were able to offer uninterrupted services with the same quality of service as we had before the pandemic. As of the pandemic, as another example or proof point, we increased our digital investment accounts, our end-to-end digital investment accounts in Germany with 40%, amongst which a number of new to bank customers. Digital has been important, digital is important, and also is important to me, innovative digital to me as a CEO.
That's why I and the board took a couple of decisions. First of all, I decided to split the roles of operations and IT, so we have a chief technology officer and we have a chief operations officer. I've done that to be able to focus on the one hand on the digital delivery, and on the other hand, on our scalable operations. The second decision we've taken is that we have refocused our investments in digital. Not so much anymore to these multi-country business integrations, but much more to where we can make a difference for our customer. Investing in our processes end-to-end digital, local for retail, global for wholesale, making reuse of our modular technology components, and thirdly, extend the use of the Center of Excellence in operations in-house.
What it will do for us is that it will basically make sure that we will decrease the time to market and the time to volume for our customers, and in turn, that gives our revenue an uplift, that's benefiting our revenue, and secondly, it will help our cost to serve, and that means that we can get our costs better under control. It is a good story, but it's not a story in isolation. Clearly, there have been a number of very uncertain macroeconomic circumstances, and these circumstances have only aggravated as a result of the terrible invasion in Ukraine, the enormous loss of lives. What it also meant is that it also impacted a number of the macroeconomic circumstances. GDP forecasts went down, energy prices went up, Mark already alluded to it.
The energy, the supply chains have been disrupted further, and also the interest rates have been going up quite dramatically, while the inflation is currently at levels higher than we've seen in many decades. Again, Ljiljana Čortan will talk about how we keep the bank safe, and we'll also talk about what we currently do about our Russian exposure like we've done with you previously as well. Tanate Phutrakul, I'm pointing at the screen, he will talk about how all these macroeconomic indicators impact our outlook, but also how we benefit from higher interest rates. Aside from these macroeconomic indicators, I want to point out that the longer term trends were there and are still there, but in an accelerated manner.
Digital was nice to have a number of years ago, but currently is need to have, and customers require a certain quality of service, and therefore, the superior customer experience, where we are going to need to measure all that detail that I talked about, straight-through processing, personalization. Environment was already important, but the past couple of years, it became in the heart of society, as to the S of social, as to the G of governance. If it's important for society, ESG and sustainability at large, it should also be important to us. We are a mirror of society. I already spoke about the growing regulatory requirements, but I don't need to speak about why they are growing. I want to talk about what it means, local compartmentalization and the need for scale in retail.
I'll repeat what I said before because it's important. Of course, with all these developments going on, we need to make sure that we attract the right talent. There's a fight for talent, there's a war for talent, whatever you wanna call it. That's why being and reinforcing our position as the best universal bank in Europe with such strong digital and operational foundations is absolutely key to be able to attract and to retain the right talent. All of those things, our strengths, the trends, the macroeconomic environments, and our learnings, what we could improve, brings into our strategy with two overarching priorities. First of all, to provide a superior customer experience, and then two, to put sustainability into the heart of what we do. Pinar, Aris, and Andrew will talk about these two overarching priorities.
Marnix van Stiphout and Ron van Kemenade will talk about two of the enabling priorities, which is how we are then going to provide a seamless digital experience, and how can we make the best use of our scalable technology and operations. Ljiljana Čortan, she will talk about how we keep the bank safe and secure in financial risk, but also on the financial risk area. Tenneke will of course, wrap it all up in the financial targets. We are not able to do this without our people. We need to be able to attract and retain the right people. One of those elements that is key in that is that we have a diverse and inclusive workforce. I will come back to that.
In the end, like I said, the third thing we are going to talk about is not only on the why and the what of our strategy, but also on the how. How are we then going to execute with discipline? Now on to that second pillar, our overarching pillar of our priority, sustainability. Our priorities are informed by the four SDGs, the sustainability development goals of the United Nations, and we can there play offense and we can play defense. If you look at the environmental dimension, we have pledged to become net zero to support our lending portfolio net zero by 2050, and it means that we need to develop roadmaps for all of our sectors to get there. Also, we need to support our customers, and we help them to finance their transition.
On the defense side, we need to make sure that we integrate and that we are working currently to integrate climate risk management into our overall risk management framework, and we use our environment and social risk policy to actually check client by client, transaction by transaction, whether they are aligned or not with that policy. We act on it. When we talk about the diversity and inclusion dimension, I have a couple of comments to make here. First of all, societies are diverse, and we as a bank operating in 40 countries with around 60,000 people, with 38 million clients, we are a mirror image of that society, so we need to be diverse as well. We should want to be diverse as well. We're also going to measure diversity.
Also what we believe is the fact that if we have teams with contrasting perspectives, different mix of teams, it means that we will be more creative, we will be more innovative, and it leads to better solutions. Look also at the diversity we have in the board, and we mirror and try to mirror that in all the teams that we have. We measure diversity, but diversity and gender diversity, but then gender diversity is about the mix. Inclusion is about behavior, and that's why also psychological safety is important to us as well as vitality of our workforce. Now the question of course is how do we then measure that?
Like I said, we have a pledge to become net zero by 2050, but that means one, that the world – the Earth should not warm up with more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, but 2050 is a long way away. That's why we need to set intermediate targets. We set those intermediate targets with a target at 2030, by which time, globally, we should have limited global emissions and decreased global emissions by 45% by that date. We're currently developing roadmaps for all of our sectors. We've developed four.
In the second half of this year, we're going to develop an additional five roadmaps, and by the end of 2023, all of our lending portfolio will be roadmapped, if you will, towards that target of 2030. For wholesale banking, we have also then set a target, how can we mobilize then also our financing and our structuring support to support our customers, and we are committing ourselves to mobilize EUR 125 billion by 2025. That's what Andrew is going to talk about as well. We've also set targets for our business banking and private individual clients, and by 2025, we're able to offer a green alternative to all of our retail customers.
On diversity, like I said, we are measuring diversity and inclusion, and we have the 70% principle for mixed teams, which means no team should consist of more than 70% of one nationality, one age group, or one gender group. We have said that we want to target for our top management, and with top management I mean the top 350, approximately, that at least 30% of that group consists of women. That's not enough. It's a target we set for now. I want to do this sustainably to get to that target. In the meantime, we continue to work on plans.
Therefore, we're also working on plans with targets for the top 10% of our population, which is approximately the top 6,000, and those plans will continue. To conclude, I've spoken about three things. I've spoken about the strengths of ING and how they have helped to create value over the past number of years. I've spoken about the fact that we see a number of trends, but we also have some lessons learned, and as a result of which, we took some decisions and actions to keep on delivering value. I've spoken about the fact how all of these trends and developments have informed us on our strategy going forward to continue to deliver in the future as well.
All the board members and I are united and determined to reinforce our position as the best universal bank in Europe, and we do that by three things. We focus on superior customer experience, and we focus on extending our leadership and sustainability, supported by our digital foundations. That's one. Secondly, we focus there where we make the most value for our customers. In retail, that means local scale. In wholesale, that means following the strengths of our network and of our economists. Last but not least, the strategy is not only about the why and the what, it's about the how. How do we execute with discipline, and how can we measure progress?
I'm going to hand over to Ron and Marnix, and they will talk about two of these enabling priorities, the seamless digital experience or seamless digital services, and also our our scalable technology and operations foundations. The reason I want them to speak first after me is because what they say is so instrumental for building that superior experience and will feed into all of the business presentations that you hear thereafter. Thank you very much.
Yes, thank you, Steven. Indeed, let's talk about our scalable technology and operations foundation. As Steven mentioned, over the past years, we tried these huge programs to harmonize our business across markets. Like Steven said, that turned out to be quite difficult, right? Because of regulation, for many reasons. The good thing that came out of that was that scalable underlying foundation. What it basically means is we did create a couple of foundational capabilities and services, you could say, that allow our business to grow at marginal cost. Why is that so relevant? Because what we're talking about is roughly 40% of our total operating expenses. If we can grow that at marginal cost, it has quite some impact on the cost of ING, right? Secondly, why it has such an impact is we are a very digital mobile-first bank.
Look at the number. Already at 91% of all our customer interactions go through mobile, and 99% if you include web channel as well. Which means that growing our business in a more digital way not only has this very granular impact on cost, but there is a double lever in there while we use our digital-first strategy. You can actually see the impact. Well, we have grown our cost only marginally with a CAGR, compounded average growth rate, of our operating expenses of 0.3%. We have consolidated now more than half of all of our mobile customers, predominantly in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, on One App, which is one of those business applications we built on top of this foundation. Let me elaborate a bit more on what the characteristics are of that foundational operations and technology platform, right?
First of all, it's highly reusable. We build once, and we implement wherever relevant. Secondly, it's highly modular, so we have broken up our end-to-end customer journeys in smaller pieces. Where applicable, we do implement the modules that are common, and we can cater for local differentiation in markets where that needs to be. Thirdly, which is an important element, it's fully self-service. We have productized, if you will, all of those services and capabilities in such a way that engineers and ops people can easily make use of them without somebody to support them. We have, you could say, taken out the middleman. It's highly digital and automated, otherwise it wouldn't scale, right? We try to take out as many human interaction as possible and preferably end-to-end straight-through processing.
The final component is where we do have operational activities that require human intervention, we concentrate all the knowledge and experience in hubs so we can again reuse across markets and segments. Marnix, in particular, will elaborate on the two last elements of this foundation. Now let me focus a bit more on the technology side. That's my job anyway. What does it look like? At the base of it, we use our scalable cloud capabilities, both private and public. It's a highly converged, highly concentrated, and fully standardized infrastructure. All the applications reside on that we move over. Then on top of that, we have our so-called bank technology platform, and we call it Touchpoint. What it is, it's a set of technologies, again, components, on top of which we build customer-facing applications.
Think about our One App, think about One Web, think about our contact center applications and branch applications. It's where we touch the customer, that's why it's called Touchpoint, that we can leverage this bank technology platform. I'm actually quite proud of it, and it's quite unique for a bank to build such an extensive in-depth technology platform. On top of that, we have this layer of reusable components and services. How it works is when engineers start building customer journeys, propositions for our customers, they take everything that is available, they reuse where possible, and then add on top local requirements. Those may be customer specific, they may be segment or product specific, or they may be regulatory specific.
A large part, in many cases now 50% of all the work that an engineer needs to do is already facilitated by this platform. What it does bring is a superior digital customer experience. It does bring a faster time- to- market by reusing. It brings consistent quality, and it reduces our cost to serve while we scale. Remember I said we can grow our business at marginal cost. Look at what has this brought to us, because this is not about a future promise. This is actually reality, and we have shown already over the past two years that we can have impact. First of all, the ING Private Cloud, and this is a substantial business case. It reduces our operating expenses over the years, more or less evenly spread by EUR 100 million. That's a huge impact on our operational expenses.
Today, we're roughly at 34% of all the applications worldwide in ING run now on our Private Cloud. We'll take that up towards 25, bringing more countries to the Private Cloud to around 70% or maybe even a bit more. On the Touchpoint Foundation, already today, 63% of all the online traffic through our web channels, mobile channels, 63% of all the online traffic goes through this platform. 63% of all our customers who log on to our services are using this. We'll bring that up to roughly 90% over time. Last but not least, our engineers have a common set of tools that they use to develop, to test, to release all their software.
Today, 40% of our engineers already use this platform for the applications they develop and manage, and we'll again take that up to roughly 90%, which again, has a huge impact on the way we deliver software on our time- to- market and on our cost to serve. Now on the more operational part of the foundation, I'd like to hand over to, like Steven said, my digital twin, Marnix.
Thanks, Ron. Do you want to sit down?
Yeah. Got it.
Let's remind ourselves, scalable operations is how we'll be talking about. Scalable operations in slightly different words than we just used is our ability to adjust to volume changes and priority change across markets and products without raising our capacity nor our cost. That's really what we set out to do, and which we have set out to do over the last couple of years. A real impact on our productivity. Towards that goal, we've got two big targets. First one is STP, already mentioned by Steven, straight-through processing, meaning that we don't touch the process manually, right? It's all straight through, quite obviously. Then we're gonna go from 60%-75%, and I'll talk about it in a minute.
The second target is to go with more than 50% of our workforce and operations to the capability hubs, the shared capability hubs. Again, Ron mentioned it also, this is something that exists today. It's proven, it's available, we just need to use it to leverage it even further, scalable. If I talk about the first target that I just raised, the 75% STP up from 60, that's a big deal for us. What we have done, we have formulated a Digi Index for ING currently on retail, Freudian. We need to add wholesale, which we'll do over the next couple of months. 350 of our largest customer journeys across the business, all of our units, all of our locations, touching 80% of our volumes in retail.
It's really the bulk of what we do. Within that STP target, the 15% percentage points uptick over the next couple of years is really about the biggest pieces, the biggest factories. That makes it such a big deal. We talk about mortgages, daily banking, contact centers, and KYC. Those are really the heart in terms of the number of people that we employ in operations globally. That will measure on a quarterly basis, all of our progress on a quarterly basis through the index across the company again. I think what's important to mention as well is that we not just, you know, talk about progress and how much have we gone up over the quarters, but also that we link it to NPS, Net Promoter Score. Steven also mentioned it.
Basically, we need to know what the impact is on the customer, right? Are we actually being seen as improving? We measure that per these bundles of customer journeys and how we improve them. Secondly is cost. As I said, these are the big factories of operations, so clearly we need to make sure we also measure the impact through cost, which we are doing. I think what is very interesting to mention, this is also back to what we've learned over the last couple of years, that this is something people can do themselves. People are really excited across all these locations that they can work on straight-through processing. They see the impact for the organization, for their teams, for how they make life easier for themselves and for their colleagues, and of course, the client impact, back to NPS.
These things are really critically important for us to make them scalable, then to our hubs. The hubs is something, again, we have done over the last couple of years, and we really see the robustness of outputs and quality from those centers. Increasingly, we're putting extra work in those locations. Besides the fact that it's, you know, interesting from a productivity perspective, 'cause you can imagine today, if you look at lending operations in wholesale, we can work, which is by the way, largely coming out of these centers, we can work on U.S. lending business today, and we can work on Australian transactions tomorrow morning. The same logic applies to, for example, CDD.
We can work on CDD for Belgium in private individuals, and we can switch that quite quickly to other markets because we're all bundled in the same location. During an age of very you know stringent capacity constraints and where people really you know chase the same people and the same talent, having those talents of us in capability hubs allows us to you know provide those individuals, those talents, new people coming in, but also people already in the bank with more profound and meaningful careers, which is again a very important thing for us to achieve. Then I wanna go through some examples. We've also had a couple of examples, and this is not exhaustive, right? I think we should be very clear, this is not all we're doing.
There are three big things that I wanna talk through. First of all, STP overall. I said 75%, and it's 15%, I can't say it often enough. It's really meaningful and has a big impact of what we do and how we do it, and on our productivity. When I talk about daily banking, one of those big blocks, we'll look at the things that you probably know, client onboarding, we talk about account opening, we talk about how we're getting a loan across the markets. People do it themselves in the locations, but we do it across the different markets. Except for wholesale, clearly, but we've got a global approach. It gets us to that 75% at least impact by 2025, happening today.
The second block, which sits in the middle, which is also at the core and the heart of our operational work, is the contact centers. What is interesting to mention, you know, wherever you are, whether you're a private individual retail client or a Business Banking client or you're a wholesale banking client, all of our clients go through the contact centers for their primary services, mainly daily banking. Wherever you are in the world, we got, in all of our markets, large or small, we've got contact centers. You can, yeah, you can imagine that the 75% I talk about in STP, a lot of that work will happen in those contact centers. All those processes going into the contact center, we want to automate. STP-ing, if that's a verb.
It will basically release work, and we can focus our attention on other more important value- add things. Another example is what we call pre-authenticated calls. Sounds difficult. It's only when I'm on an app or you're on an app or a Business Banking client is on an app or a wholesale banking, all of our clients, you go directly into our contact center. We know who you are, we know what you want, and you're being directed automatically to the right person, to the right desk. That helps, again, you know, our interaction with our clients and our productivity and of course, also MPS. That also goes for routing these calls to bots, which help us to even increase the productivity further.
All in all, we're saying in contact centers, where we've got 31 million calls or contacts in 2021, already down the years before to 2021, we wanna take another 30% at least out, which gives us EUR 50 million of benefits across these periods, largely equally distributed across the years. That's happening today, again, back to this is proven happening, which is important. KYC, I think this is where both STP and the capability hubs come together. We've rolled out, you know, to almost all locations, we're almost done, our target technologies, which help us a great deal, and are putting the resources for KYC into those capability hubs to 60% by 2025 allows us to speed that up.
It allows us to move capacity around, as I just talked about, from market to market, segment to segment, a lot more quickly, really dealing with priorities more swiftly. Also in terms of STP, we see that when we do this jointly in those centers, we're really, you know, bumping up the STP rates. Even today, on low-risk CDDs for private individuals, we have already reached 95%. You can see if you pull this together, how this further exacerbates or increases the productivity. This is really, you know, of course, very much in a nutshell what we're working on, and as I said, not exhaustive, but it gets me to the conclusion.
The way I look at this, and also going back to what Steven said and what Ron said earlier, we've learned a great deal over the last couple of years, or probably more than just a couple of years. Things that have gone well and things that have gone not so well. The way I look at this myself, I'm using a small analogy. I think previously we were going across all these markets trying to put in exactly the same house, identical houses, irrespective of the commercial or regulatory environments, et cetera. That didn't really work for us, right? That didn't really go well enough. We have moved on through these learnings and become more practical at this and say, "We'll put in the houses, but they're different.
The commercials are different, the regulatory environment is different, everything is different in these markets, so let's make sure we adapt our house." There's a big but, and the but is where we come in, largely, Ron and I. We use the same materials, we use the same process, the same plumbing, and we put the same energy label on it. We have the benefit of actually having productivity and efficiency, but we don't squander or compromise, probably is a better word to use, our client proposition across these markets. You could argue it's the best of both worlds through hard learning, but also through proven pieces that we are reusing and leveraging. That gets us ultimately to a situation where we become more seamless digital, quicker to market, cheaper cost to serve, better quality, which is obvious, yielding a superior client experience.
We're doing all this, you know, over the next couple of years, and even today, that's where Ron started. We still invest in scalable technology and operations, but we're absorbing largely the cost of inflation and the cost of volume growth. That's where we end up. That's where we draw to a pause on technology and operations. Thank you. We've got a 20-minute break, and then please back into the room. Thank you. Thank you, and welcome back after the break. Kind reminder, if you have turned on your phones, to turn them off again. It's with great pleasure that I invite Pinar and Aris to the stage to present our retail franchises.
It's great, with you at an IR day.
It is.
Hi, everybody. I'm gonna spend with Pinar. I'll stand here the next 15 or 20 minutes or so to go over our retail business and update you on our plans. The way it's gonna work is I'll quickly go over a few broad themes that cover all our franchise, Market Leaders and C&G, and then Pinar will come up and talk in a little more detail about Market Leaders and the developments there. I'll then take over again and do the C&G part, and then finish with just reiterating our ambitions for our retail bank. Okay. Let's get started. We serve 37 million customers today in Europe, Australia, and the Philippines.
Our portfolio is quite diversified and well-balanced, and all the geographic clusters are contributing in a meaningful way. Equally important, six of the eleven countries have a leading NPS score, and that shows that our customers do appreciate us, of course, but we never take that for granted or even get complacent. Actually, it does the opposite. It actually forces us to continuously up our game to maintain our leadership position in the eyes of our customers. Since I last saw you all in, I think, 2019 in Frankfurt, we've been busy creating value in the franchise and creating value in four ways, really, in driving a superior customer experience, digital leadership, improving our revenue generating power and cost discipline.
On the superior customer experience, you heard from Steven earlier today, we've added nearly 3 million primary customers since 2017. Digital leadership, you also heard that from Ron. 91% of the interactions now we have with our customers in ING is coming through the mobile channel, and that changes a lot of things. Low rates forced us to reexamine our revenue generating model, and you can see here we added EUR 2 billion in what we call non-interest income, so non-deposit income over the period at a clip of almost 6% per year, and I'll come back to that in a second. Finally, cost discipline. We've lowered the cost over balances by around 6 basis points, and this has come from three ways, I think. Digitalization, of course, and you heard about that as well this morning.
Footprint optimization, and more recently, divestments we've made from some subscale markets. Altogether, these things have brought us an ROE roughly pushing 16% on average every year since 2017. I'm gonna quickly walk through a few of these now. Make no mistake about it, ING is a digital bank, and we've had this in our DNA since we launched ING Direct more than 25 years ago, and that legacy actually lives on in the way we're dealing now with mobile and our effort to increase mobile engagement, including mobile sales. It starts quite simply with ensuring that every product journey can start on mobile and hopefully end on mobile. That's where our effort has been over the past few years across the franchise.
More importantly is linking these customer journeys with our other channels to create a very powerful one omnichannel experience. This also means harnessing customer data, the mounds of data we're getting now through the digital world. You have to harness this customer data responsibly and create insights for your customers so they can make better and more informed financial decisions. This digital intimacy is the key driver for the sales on mobile that you see here. Now, when you look at this chart, you see the progress has been substantial. We're not there yet, but I'm not surprised because like I said at the very beginning, we're ING and this is what we do. We master digital. Steven talked about this as well this morning, but at the end of the day, even in the bank, it's all about the customer.
What we avail ourselves to do is to provide a superior customer experience, relevant, easy, personal, instant, at every important customer touchpoint with the bank. This influences the way we communicate with our customers and engage with them, the way we develop our value propositions, the way we onboard customers, even including KYC, and how we fulfill customer requests in the bank. At the end of the day, it also means having this ethos of what I call continuous improvement. Marnix talked about it this morning, of how we look at every process and find ways to make it faster, simpler, and more digital.
What you heard this morning about STP rates, getting those STP rates higher not only improves efficiency, of course, but actually drives more engagement with our customers to help us realize our ambition that we've set to be an NPS leader in every market, and to drive and get 17 million primary customers by 2025. The reason's simple: we know primary customers are far more engaged, buy far more product, far more loyal, and obviously far more profitable for the bank. One of the things that low rates, they say necessity is the mother of invention, and in the case with low rates, which hit us quite hard in the Eurozone, it forced us to reexamine our revenue-generating model. We looked at everything, the usual suspects: assets under management, insurance, daily banking, brokerage.
We looked at it all, and we revisited how we're going to now create a meaningful fee business. Over the period, I'm happy and very proud to say that we've added EUR 700 million in fees. Again, the better news is we still believe there's more runway ahead. There's more runway three ways. First, continuing to grow primary customers, and it's in our plans. You've seen, and we've experienced, and we measure this quite religiously. Primary customers buy more product from us, and they especially buy more fee-generating products like funds and insurance. The second, no surprise for a big savings bank like ING with billions in savings, the assets under management product line offers tremendous opportunity, which we've actually leveraged over the last three years, and there's still more growth there.
More growth by tapping into our massive savings pool of customers to give them ETF offers that will help them diversify and even potentially find higher yield. It's also in brokerage, not only e-brokerage, but mortgage brokerage, where we have a very strong and leading mortgage broker in Munich called Interhyp. Then obviously, it's the further optimization of daily banking fees. We only started outside the market leader countries, in the ING Direct countries, we started introducing fees, and we started optimizing them, introducing behavioral fees, and really working this lever where we saw and continue to see opportunity. When you take all these three elements together, we're confident we can generate 5%-10% fee growth each and every year out to 2025. Now it's your turn.
Thanks, Aris. Thank you very much. Thanks. Within this great global retail strategy, now I would like to deep dive into Retail Netherlands and Retail Belgium. These two units, these two great franchises capture roughly 58% of our global retail profits. 58% of our global retail profits. Let me start with Retail Netherlands. Retail Netherlands is a truly digital universal bank. Just to give you a few facts, we have 4.5 million primary users in the Netherlands. Out of that, 80% of which is active. In this country, we serve more than 600,000 entrepreneurs, out of which, again, more than 80% of them is active. Give you a few more facts about the engagement levels that we have on this digital platform.
Every single day to our global app in the Netherlands, here in this country only, we get 8 million logins of our clients. 8 million logins come to our app every single day. It is actually very rare to find a financial institution being in the top ten list of social digital platforms. ING Bank's mobile app iOS is actually in the top ten list of active users in the digital social platforms, following applications like WhatsApp and Instagram. In the Netherlands, we have a pretty active digital client base, whether it's the entrepreneurs but also the private clients. As Aris also indicated, digital is also ING's bread and butter. It's our DNA.
As a result of it, and thanks to all the investments that we have made in digital in the last two years, we have seen an increasing demand of our clients shifting from physical channels to digital channels. That resulted in 35% less call volumes, more than 60% less demand for our physical channels. We still have room to further improve our client experience because while doing all of this, our Net Promoter Score actually started to also improve as well. Going forward, there are three opportunities that we can still improve our cost to serve. Opportunity one is we still have ample room of opportunity to further improve and expand our digital offering on this mobile platform.
One example, currently in this country, we can onboard only one third of our clients, as Marnix van Stiphout explained, straight through, meaning no human touch through digital platforms. Only in a few months, we will be able to onboard more than 70% of our clients with no human touch directly through the mobile platforms. There are many examples like that where we will expand the offering that we have on the digital channels and especially mobile. Second, we also see, anything that we cannot do instant and personalized as our clients wish on the app, we will leverage more and more ING hubs. We have already started using the hubs for our retail operations, in certain areas, primarily in KYC here in the Netherlands, but we see other opportunities where we can actually reach to more expertise and more scale at the same time.
The third opportunity is what Ron explained on technology. Retail Netherlands has a very strong technology team. In the last few years, we have already decommissioned our mainframe, one of the few organizations actually who could do that. We still see quite a bit of an opportunity to further simplify our technology landscape so that our clients actually will get access to better future-proof technology, but also be able to reduce the cost of technology of providing all these great services to them. Ample room of opportunity to further improve our cost to serve. Now, let's look at the fees. Aris has already mentioned that we have done great on fees. Retail Netherlands for sure has been a great contributor of that. One of the strong fee areas we have in the Netherlands is daily mobile banking.
Our clients actually really love to get access to personalized mobile banking services for their daily banking needs. They pay to us on a subscription model. More than 70% of our daily banking fees here in the Netherlands is on a subscription model, and it will continue like that also going forward. On top of that, we also see opportunities to further improve our investment and protection related fees. Again, I will give you a few facts on how. Less than only 10% of our clients today in the Netherlands have a protection product that they buy from ING. Only 6% of our clients actually invest with ING.
Of course, knowing that in the last few years, we have expanded our investments towards offering these clients better experiences, especially on the digital platform, so that we can actually improve our penetration both on protection and investment. Resilient daily banking, primarily a subscription model, improved fees with investments and insurance will actually contribute significantly also in the future to the fee growth that Aris has mentioned in the global retail. I'm sure there are many people in this room who are wondering and will probably ask me lots of questions on NII in the Netherlands, but I am going to leave that response to Tanate because Tanate will explain us globally for the whole balance sheet how NII will actually play into, and he will deep dive into details of the assumptions that we have made for NII also in the Netherlands.
Let's now take a look at year 2025. What do we see? First of all, we are a very big bank in this country, so that comes with an obligation. Back to what Steven explained on sustainability targets, we are fully committed to use our expertise but also use our scale to create a big impact here. We will produce more than 20% of our lending, whether it's mortgages or it's business lending, in sustainable lending products by year 2025. There is another area where we are very passionate, especially in the Netherlands, on financial health, because we saw millions of clients in this country with rising inflation and increasing interest rates would actually face challenges.
We will invest significantly to improve the financial health of our clients so that they can actually build savings buffers for the environment to come. This is very important for us that we will leverage our scale and expertise to be an impactful bank here in the Netherlands to lead on sustainability. That's the first thing by 2025. The second thing is we are dedicated to our customer experience, and we will continue to improve that. We are already strong on Net Promoter Score, but we would like to be number one by 2025 in the Netherlands, serving our clients with the best experiences.
The third thing is with all these improvements on cost to serve and on income side, as it is today, Retail Netherlands will continue to contribute significantly the financial health of the group with a cost- to- income well below 50%, with a strong ROE contribution. That's in summary, Retail Netherlands. Let me now cross the border. I move now to Retail Belgium. The first word that comes to my mind when I look at Retail Belgium is customer centricity. This is a bank that customer focus is in the DNA of this bank. I had the honor this year to celebrate together with our colleagues and also our employees, the 150 years of us being in Belgium. 150 years.
We serve entrepreneurs in this country, not only in this generation, but also in the very few other generations in the past. I can tell you, we are also fully committed to serve the entrepreneurs for many years to come. We also need to do much better on improving our client experience because being 150 years in Belgium also comes with a responsibility that we need to be great in client experience. First, I will tell you a few things about what we have done in the last two years. We have launched One App and One Web that Ron has explained in Belgium, not only for our private individual clients, but also for SMEs and mid-corps. The entire Benelux currently operates on a single state-of-the-art technology on the app and web.
We have actually launched a new consumer lending platform in Belgium, same as in Netherlands, operate in a new technology stack. We have upgraded our investment platform and finalized our launch also especially serving different products for different segments with a new platform. Also the same platform in Netherlands but also in Belgium. We have radically improved our assisted channels and contact center toolkit. With all these actual improvements on technology, our intention is actually to improve the client experience. Our clients started to reward us by giving us better app ratings. This is the start of it, and we will continue to further optimize and expand our offering going forward. What are the opportunities for further optimizing our client experience but also reducing our cost to serve in Belgium, which I'm also equally sure that you'll ask me questions about it.
Let me respond. There is ample room of opportunity to further expand both daily banking services but also several sales journeys to be put, made available on the app, but also leverage the adoption for our clients. One example, this year we have launched instant lending for our small entrepreneur clients in Belgium. Instant means no human touch, directly accessible from mobile. We are the first bank in Belgium, actually, who could do that. We will, rest assured, expand that offering to not only that segment, but to the other segments, to make lending much easier, accessible, personalized, instantly available through digital. This is just one example. Another example, we have successfully managed to switch from a third-party provider doing our KYC services to ING hubs.
Working with our hubs in Warsaw and Manila with much better efficiency but more importantly much better quality within less than a year. There are many other opportunities in ING Belgium, both in the private individual segment but also for our entrepreneurs to further expand our digital offering and not only that, our bankers will also benefit from these opportunities. Thanks to that, Belgium is a very branch-based market. With only the improvements in last two years, we have actually managed to reduce our physical footprint more than 30% in less than two years. Going forward, as our clients prefer digital services with all these improvements, we will continue to look at further optimization. Expansion of instant personalized delivery on the app with more straight-through processing, expansion of the usage of ING hubs, optimized footprint, and the last one is on technology.
In Belgium, in the last two years, we have really executed with a very strong discipline the shift to ING Private Cloud. What Ron has shown you as the overall business case of ING Private Cloud and most of which comes actually from a contribution of Netherlands but also Belgium. There are other components in our technology stack in Belgium that I can assure you step by step, not with a big bank, but every single month, every single quarter, we know how to decommission and move to future state technology that you will also see helping us on managing our technology costs but also improving what we offer to our clients. These are the areas where we will constantly and continue to improve our cost to serve with the primary intention to improve the customer experience for our clients.
Now let me move also to the fees, how Belgium will continue on the fees. Daily banking, similar to Netherlands, is a very important product for us. Similarly, with a model where we have a subscription base, but on top of it, Belgium is also one of our richest units in terms of fee contribution, both on investments but also in insurance. Also in Belgium, what we see is we have still room to go. We have room to go to penetrate the existing wallets of our clients because they have investments elsewhere. We also have room to go because some of our product propositions were missing. All of that we have invested in the last two years, and we are expecting increased penetration levels of both protection together with our insurance partners but also on investments going forward.
Daily banking continued, investment penetration increasing and also insurance penetration increasing will contribute to the fees. This will of course be supported similar to Netherlands with a strong private banking franchise. Overall, when I look at retail Belgium year 2025, first again we are a large bank also in Belgium, and we are especially important for the entrepreneurs in Belgium, and we will put a big effort to offer sustainable lending products supporting our clients transition for alternative energy sources. That is very important for us. Second, we are going to improve the Net Promoter Score in Belgium with continuous investments in the areas that we have explained. Third, Belgium cost income, despite rising inflation, and inflation is everywhere, I can tell you, but indexation is only in Belgium.
Despite inflation and indexation, we'll actually remain quite under control that we are committed to have Retail Belgium with less than 58% cost/income, which is a big improvement compared to today's level, with, again, becoming a strong contributor to the ROE. I'm quite confident we will get there because I have, like many other teams that we have in ING, have an excellent committed team to reach those numbers. Now I talk to you about 2 retail franchises and how we will continue to the group. I would like to give it back to Aris Bogdaneris, because he's gonna talk to you about another amazing franchise, Retail Germany, with ample room of opportunity for growth, but also the rest of C&G, where I originally come from, so I will proudly listen, Aris Bogdaneris. Back to you.
Okay. Thank you. I remember when I joined ING seven years ago, and I first met the CEO at the time, he's no longer with us, and I challenged him, "Why don't we do with such an amazing franchise, high NPS scores, digital, customers love them, why can't we do more than mortgages and savings?" We had our battles at the time. Fast-forward seven years, when you look at this chart, I think the answer has been given. We have had, thanks to low rates, oddly enough, the opportunity to diversify what I believe is one of the strongest franchises, not only in Germany but in all of Europe, as a digital franchise with a very strong customer following, but now has begun to scale.
As you see here, not only are the customers growing and the primary customers growing, of course it has to, but we're operating in what is the largest retail banking market in Europe by a mile, and we have a leading franchise sitting there. The role now and the game we play now is build additional firepower in our other products. We have a very strong mortgage business to begin with. Now, savings becomes interesting again as rates start to climb. But when you now combine this fee business that we've created, both in brokerage, assets under management, business, on top of that liability franchise that historically has been very strong, you have a very, very bright future ahead.
I think one of the things we're also doing, and we've learned, that this strong brand can be leveraged, and we've actually now decided to leverage this brand in the smaller end of SMEs. We recently launched a digital-only proposition in partnership also with Amazon. This is a space we wanna play in. The SME market in Germany is big, it's attractive, and it's ripe for disruption. We wanna be there. It's a long road, of course, but we're gonna stay there and see how we can also scale up there. As Pinar said, it's a bit about many things to continue the momentum. Of course, we're not gonna take our foot off the fee pedal. We're gonna continue to grow fees as we grow primaries, as we grow asset management business, as we grow our brokerage business.
I mentioned earlier, Interhyp, which is actually brokering EUR 32 billion in mortgages every year and is getting fees for that. They're growing their fee business every year, double-digit. The cost- to- income will come down below 50%. Again, leveraging the scalable tech and ops you heard about earlier this morning, particularly as Marnix mentioned in the contact center, where we see massive opportunity as we scale. That's the German story. One must not overlook what I call other C&G. This part of our business, these are the businesses we run outside of Market Leaders and outside of Germany, contribute roughly 30% of our income and over 40% of our primary customers.
After the recent divestitures of our businesses in Austria, Czech, and France, the profile of this cluster of units has increased dramatically in terms of their attractiveness. Again, like in the previous slide of Germany, you see growth. This is also a growth engine. We benefit particularly from the fact that we have multiple units who operate outside the Eurozone and still during the falling rate environment, they were still able to earn on liabilities, earn on both sides of the balance sheet, and you see the impact there it had on our financials. Similar to what you heard from Pinar, there's a lot of work as we grow profitably and grow scalability. Here again, we're gonna be leveraging scalable tech and ops, and particularly again on assisted channels, as we mentioned.
We're also gonna regain some of the liability margin and benefit from that as well. These are NPS leaders. Five of the seven businesses here have a number one NPS in their digital banks. Again, that's the place you wanna be in these markets. These markets are growing fast, faster than we see in Western Europe. Let me try and wrap up now. We covered a lot of ground, and I'm not gonna repeat some of the things you see on this page, but I think suffice to say is we have a very strong core of retail banks and a very attractive footprint. As you heard, we're digital, we're obsessed with providing a superior customer experience. We have a fee business now that's a serious fee business across the footprint, not just in Market Leaders.
We're focused, obviously, on cost to serve as we scale up. Now we have the technology solutions to enable us more than ever before. Now to repeat the targets, you have talked about them a little bit. 17 million primary customers by 2025. Income growth in line with the group guidance. 5%-10% annual fee growth. An overall franchise cost- to- income in retail below 50%, helping us generate ROE above 18% in 2025. I would be remiss to not mention what our most powerful element is to realize these ambitions. I'm sorry, Steven, it's not superior customer experience or digital, but it's our people. You know it very well. You mentioned it as well. We have the best retail bankers across the footprint in every country who are delivering these results.
This is the secret sauce of ING, and we've been doing it for 25 years. These are the people who are driving this NPS leadership and digital leadership and superior customer leadership, all the leadership that we exhibit in our countries. I want to call out to them because they're making the big difference. On that note, I'd like to stop, and I would like to ask Andrew to come on stage.
Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. Delighted to be here to talk about the wholesale banking business. My name is Andrew Bester, and nice to see some familiar faces from my former life. Today is gonna be about the ING story. Maybe I'll start out with, for me personally, what drew me to ING. I competed against ING over the years, and the thing that always struck me were a few features. Firstly, the unique position ING has in the Eurozone in banking. Secondly, the very long run reputation as a real sustainability leader. You take that, and you add the brand that we've heard articulated today, innovation, digital, entrepreneurial. The traits that I think represent success in banking going forward.
The other interesting feature about ING and our clients. Clients love doing business with ING, and I'll talk about that a little bit later. I'll pick up on Aris' final comment as well. 12,000 committed colleagues working across 40 countries, delivering, and people with top quartile engagement. Highly engaged colleagues working for their clients every day. Maybe let's just start and look at the track record of the wholesale banking business since 2017. What I would say is it's been a period of focus. It's been a period of focus on the clients where the fit of ING and those clients works. Let's bring that to life. 67% increase in the income we make per client group versus 2017. Secondly, this is an efficient low-cost wholesale banking franchise.
A cost-income ratio in the low 50s, in an industry where our peers are in the low 70s. A very long and strong track record of managing credit risk through the cycle. Loan losses of 39 basis points relative to our customer lending versus, again, our peers in the high 50s. We're still only making 8.4% return on equity. Again, we can console ourselves 4.5% ROA to our competitors, but we know that we want to continue to create more value, but more about that in a second. We've also been able to increase our income to risk rates, and I'll dive into that a little later. Let me start. Why do clients come to ING? Circa 6,000 client groups who choose to work with ING. For me, it's down to a few things.
Firstly, the global reach, the 40 countries that we operate in, delivering, in particular, our strength across the Eurozone to those global companies, be they U.S. multinationals, Asian multinationals, financial institutions looking to access into Europe. 35% of our income comes from delivering that network for our clients every single day around the world. The next aspect is the sector expertise that is at the heart of ING. Maybe a bit of history. That business was founded and came out of the Barings structured finance business of the nineties. Deep sector experts. Experts that are able to take that expertise and work in complex situations and create solutions for clients. That spans retail and infrastructure, our TMT franchise, how we support the commodities, food and agricultural sector, transport and logistics, healthcare, financial institutions, and indeed, our very strong energy franchise.
This is not superficial client sector expertise. This is deep expertise delivered by colleagues every single day. What's particularly heartening is from 2017 to today, what we see is that over 60% increase in the number of clients who are coming back to do business with us. Sustainability pioneering, something I care passionately about personally, and one of the reasons when I competed with ING is I look at, wow, look at what they're doing in sustainability. The bank that did the first sustainability linked loan back in 2017. We mobilize, as Steven alluded to earlier, EUR 88 billion of support for our clients, be that advising them, financing them, in thinking through their transition. We are pioneers in the sustainability space, and we're gonna build on that.
You don't drive superior customer experience, indeed client experience, unless you're serving your clients in a superior way every day. I'm an old-fashioned client relationship banker, and their promoter scores +59. What's been really heartening is that's 20 points better than in 2017. It's also 12 points better than our competitors. A relationship-based bank where our client relationship managers and a single client model are delivering to our clients every day. Clients, you can have great relationships. What you need to do is make sure you've got the product capability to be able to deliver for those clients. For us, it's the sort of wholesale banking product stack that you would expect. It starts with writing corporate lending to our clients, the base funding of their needs across their global businesses. Secondly, the more specialized areas of financing.
When clients are dealing with complex cash flows, complex situations, building on that sector expertise, as I said, bringing that specialized finance capability. Crucially, you're with multinationals, the treasurer's friend, thinking through what they do and managing their working capital every day. Be that in trade, be that in managing their receivables, how they manage their cash across the world every single day. Then above that, helping our clients think about hedging their exposures, be they interest rates, currencies, commodity risks, the expertise of our financial markets platform delivering that. When big events happen and clients reach moments of transition, and they need more strategic support in their financing, we bring together our loan capital markets expertise, our debt syndicate expertise, our ratings advisory capacity, and our targeted capability in corporate finance and equity capital markets for our clients.
All of that is done with prudent, sound risk appetite. 80% of our franchise is investment grade today. It is well diversified. You're gonna hear from Liliana when she describes the diversity, not just by sector, but indeed by geography in the franchise. Two-thirds of our business today is either asset-backed, fully or partially secured. Our trade business is focused on supporting trade and capital flows around the world, focused on short-term, self-liquidating transactions. Our markets platform is there to serve our clients and manage that flow. What is the franchise? Broadly speaking, a top 5 loan syndications house in the Eurozone, top 10 renewable finance, renewable financing house, top 3 global trade and commodity provider. It is the leading global cash pooling franchise for large global corporates in the world, and the BNG, the bank, vendors, clients proposition in our transaction services business.
We are a top 10 player in Euro investment-grade corporate bonds. Our clients like us, and we deliver this capability for them. What do we need to do as we go forward? What are our priorities to start to think about higher returns on equity? There are a few things that we think will support that. Firstly, we believe there is an amazing opportunity to support the green transition financing needs of our clients, build on that sustainability pioneering positioning I described and support that. Secondly, in running a modern wholesale bank, you need to be obsessive about returns and making sure you get the right return out of the capital you deploy.
You heard Ron and Marnix talk about what we need to do to scale our technology and operations and talk about how we do that in the wholesale bank using the expertise and capability that their teams bring. Let's start first and talk about the green transition. The International Energy Agency estimates that for us to achieve net zero by 2050, there'll be need for $5 trillion of financing per year by 2030. We have the expertise through those deep sectors that I described earlier to start thinking about how we might support that transition. Interestingly, if you look at those charts above, you'll see quite an interesting map between the sector expertise that needs to fund that transition according to the agencies and our own capability. There's another also very important part, and this comes to real credibility.
When we started working on climate in the bank, we built a methodology we call Terra, which is detailed work driven by real experts, thinking about the carbon pathways between now and 2050. Our teams provide a very transparent analysis of where we are and where we need to get to. If you read our integrated climate report, you'll get to see the detail with which we think about these themes. As that top 10 renewable finance bank, we're also already providing 60% of our financing in power through renewables, as you saw Steven's highlight earlier. To keep this position, we know we need to do more. That's why Steven articulated bigger targets for the whole bank.
In the wholesale bank, just to get into a little bit more detail, we are now revisiting our net zero pathways. Bringing forward the targets across all our sectors to 20 to 2030. The teams have worked through that in 2022, building on the sectors that Steven highlighted earlier. We're going another level deeper. With our largest clients across these major sectors, we're also building transition pathways, so we understand our major clients' transitions as they think about how they finance that. We're gonna work inclusively with our clients to help them finance that. As Steven said earlier, we believe that with that, the EUR 88 billion of financing and advice we're providing our clients today can go to EUR 125 billion. When we think about the transition to a greener, better world, we think of opportunity.
We think about how we take our current capabilities with our teams and build an inclusive future. The second topic, obsessively focused on increasing the capital efficiency of the Wholesale Bank. It's maybe worth just giving a little bit of context. Steven talked about some of the regulatory headwinds that we've had across the bank. In Wholesale Banking, we started in 2017 with EUR 146 billion of risk weights. Those headwinds around different capital treatments, different regulatory rules, meant that actually, our capital increased EUR 35 billion. Just under 25% increase in the amount of capital we needed to put aside for our wholesale banking business. As you would expect, we've been supporting our clients in recent years, so new volumes have come on top of that.
What we're able to do is bring that back with management actions, driving efficiencies, making sure that we improve the quality of the loan book to be able to get that back to be flat. When we pull that together from an income to risk weight point of view, we've made some progress. 3.9% in 2017. Today, 4.1%. We need to continue to think about what we need to do. What are we gonna be doing and challenging ourselves more to do in the coming years? Firstly, we're gonna continue that journey we've been on to make sure that we optimize our portfolio, that we keep deploying capital in those relationships where it's mutually beneficial, where our expertise and the client's needs have a good match.
Secondly, we need to continue to increase the velocity and the of the capital on our balance sheet. Make sure that we contribute both in its primary and in secondary business to get more velocity. Also make sure in the transactions where we are supporting clients, that we reduce the level of holds that we have. There's lots to do in terms of how we manage the data, how we structure our deals, to make sure we continue to optimize as well. Last but not least, and very importantly in Wholesale Bank, continue to focus on with these high-quality relationships we have, that we can both build the capability and enhance our capability to grow our fees even more. We will do that through providing high-value, specialized solutions for our clients. I've talked about capital efficiency.
Now let's talk about what we need to do to make sure that we are also ensuring we're delivering efficient and seamless digital services. Marnix talked about this. We're working very closely with Marnix and his teams, and Ron's team, to think about how we can be more seamless in the customer journeys that we have. For example, in what we're doing in our end-to-end lending journey. For example, helping our clients open their accounts more easily. In addition to that, making sure that our omnichannels are available for all our clients. Our clients are operating on different platforms, and we need to make sure that we're there for them. A modern relationship manager also needs to be digitally enabled. We need to keep extending the tools.
Last but not least, making sure that we're providing relevant insights both for our clients and for our client-facing colleagues. If I pull that all together, we see a real opportunity to get to a 10% return on equity in the wholesale banking business. We're gonna pull the income levers that I described. We are following tailwinds in interest rates in our transaction services business. There are opportunities to grow our lending profitably. That green transition opportunity I described. We'll grow income in line with guidance. In addition to that, we're gonna continue to drive efficiency and ensure the Wholesale Banking cost/income ratio stays below 50%. We'll continue to improve our income to risk weights.
Through that, keep up our strong track record of keeping our risk costs below, low, and indeed, very low through the cycle. I believe you put that all together, we will achieve 10% return on equity by 2025. With that, I'd like to pass you to Ljiljana Čortan, our Chief Risk Officer, who's gonna run through her presentation. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone in the room. It's good to see you all here, and specifically for me, it's the first time in my role of Chief Risk Officer of ING Groep to talk to you. Well, I'm probably, after Andrew, the one with shortest tenure in ING, but my blood is already orange. I'm very keen today with you to share some of my views on risk management of ING Groep, but as well as some of the key success factors that have enabled a strong risk positioning, and as well to share some of priorities that are high on our agenda. Let me start with reiterating the context of uncertainties we live in. Disappointing post-pandemic economic growth. Higher for longer inflation. No one sees an end to it. Late policy responses, broken supply chains, zero COVID policy in China, ideological and political polarization of the world.
All of these in times when the world would have to be stronger and more united than ever in order to face and fight some of the global, real global civilization challenges like climate change. On top of that, the terrifying war in Ukraine has aggravated and will aggravate some of the consequences of the challenges I mentioned. I've been asked recently many times if I'm worried. Of course I am. I'm a Chief Risk Officer. My job is to be worried. If you ask me if I'm confident that ING is well equipped and better positioned to sail through the rough seas ahead of us, I'm as well. We're confident, and we will continue promising our clients and delivering on our promises and our strategy and make themselves and ourselves and all of our stakeholders safe, secure, and compliant. Let me tell you how.
Let's start with fundamentals, how we manage our credit risk. The strength of our credit risk management framework relies on the diversification principle. This is the hard lesson we all learned after the global financial crisis, where actually we face some of the concentration risks. That's why nowadays we do have the caps on exposure according to the diverse criteria, being it geography, industry sector, specific clients, or specific asset classes. This is the end state that is defined in our risk policies. Where it starts from is a disciplined origination. Disciplined origination according to the well-cascaded granular risk appetite in the organization. As we've seen from the Andrew's presentation, our book is well diversified. Our structures are almost fully senior. We understand which risks we are onboarding and which clients we want to onboard, and we know how to manage these risks.
How do we do that? It's very important that we stay close to our clients, that we have the insights in their behaviors, thus also possibility to react to the early warnings or even to the early distress signs. This is what this is all about, proactive risk management. However, having product expertise, having strong industry expertise, this would not be possible without risk awareness and people and culture that are making these risk management principles being a daily principles of life. Actually, this approach is well confirmed and has resulted in a very strong credit risk position of ING portfolio. I'm sure you all know these slides because we are giving it regularly in the updates, quarterly updates, but I'd just like to run you through some of the numbers to underpin my confidence. Starting with diversification.
If you look by geography, ING portfolio consists more than 60% of its lending book into the strongest European zone economies, the Netherlands, BeLux, and Germany. If you look at the product diversification, more than 40% of our portfolio relates to residential mortgages. Again, in our strongest markets. Andrew has mentioned as well, actually among others, one of the reasons why our RWA in the past and also currently has not grown as it should have based on the regulatory headwinds that we have experienced.
There are two of the KPIs that I would like to share with you that are underpinning this statement, because you'll see, for example, for the retail mortgages, that there is a continuous trend of decrease of our loan to value, which is now well below 60%, despite as well, clearly pandemic and also taking into account that the prices have gone up. This is fair to admit. However, also on the wholesale banking side, you'll see that our book structured in investment and non-investment grade has never had actually better positioning. 80% of our book is in investment grade area. So well-diversified, well-secured, well collateralized. 70% of our portfolio is to some extent covered by collateral.
On top of that, we are dynamically increasing our coverage of stage three exposure to a current, I would say, 34%, which is well diversified according to the segments, having in mind as well, as I mentioned, collateral behind. Track record adds to my confidence. Best in class already for years and throughout the cycle in the risk costs, but as well a remarkable NPL ratio of only 1.5% compared to the Eurozone, but I would say as well to some global players, a remarkable result. A good proof point of everything I've said and the way how we manage and our approach to the risk management, but as well our risk management capabilities, is how we manage our Russia exposure.
Let me remind you that since 2014 and actually Crimea crisis, we have taken our job seriously and have started decreasing thoughtfully and through our disclosure to the Russia-related entities. What does it mean as well? We have looked at the type of the products that we are having with this area, and we have also gone into the more collateralized part. At the inception of the crisis in February this year of the invasion, unlawful invasion of Ukraine, we have started with EUR 6.7 billion. You will all remember the number from the press release of total exposure that at that point of time was just below 1% of the total lending portfolio. What have we done in the last 90 days?
We have defined a good business and risk strategy with which we said we will not do new business with the Russian counterparts, and we will engage strongly with the existing ones in order to find a way to preserve the value and to further derisk. The results are obvious. In the last 90 days, we have decreased our Russian-related exposure by more than 25%. I'm happy to share that also, as of end of May, we are just below EUR 5 billion of total exposure. I think those are remarkable results in very difficult times, and I'm thanking to all of people who have contributed to that. How do we do that? No big announcements. Decisive de-risking, decisive acting, walking the talk. I've said a lot about what and what gives me also the reason for my confidence.
I'd like to focus a bit on how, and specifically on how we manage our non-financial risks. Operational resilience concept is a very important concept for ING, and I also like us all to look back into the pandemic time and actually to remind ourselves that we have been operating without disruptions in a very challenging environment. Not just that we have provided an uninterrupted service to our clients, we have as well enabled our colleagues to work from home or to work in a hybrid model. During that time, we haven't experienced major incidents from external world, nor have our internal processes or our internal IT systems contributed to higher operational risk losses. We have managed well throughout the pandemic. However, as we know, this is the area that is most vulnerable in the banking industry and far outside the banking industry.
If you have seen the risk study of the World Economic Forum, you would see that going forward the people who were asked, and those are academics, people from the corporate world, banking industry, have actually labeled 9 out of the top 10 risks for the future as being non-financial. Only the risk number 9 is actually financial debt, actually sovereign debt crisis. All the rest is related to non-financial risks, including clearly the ESG component onto it. That's why it's extremely important for us to continue focusing on security of our identity access management, our fraud capabilities detection, but as well cybersecurity. How do we do that? We use data analytics to help us spot the anomalies and the patterns that will lead to certain detection.
We are as well very much engaging with the third parties because we do believe these risks do not have the name, nationality or organization. They are cross-organizational, they are cross-border, and we need to act jointly in order to effectively manage those. Let me reassure you that safe, secure and compliant is one of the most important, if not or definitely conditions sine qua non for enabling our Making the Difference strategy. When we say that, we are committed decisively to continue our efforts on building our strong and responsible position in society and being an effective gatekeeper when it comes to management of AML and other compliance risks. In the last years, we have increased strongly our capacities, both in terms of numbers but as well we have upgraded our skills on how we do that.
We have implemented the global KYC and compliance organization, but we are also utterly committed going forward to the continuous roll-on of the global standards, global tools and also global systems, how to manage the KYC process and other compliance risk clearly throughout the life cycle of the relationship. We also wholeheartedly invite all our peers, regulators, policy makers and others interested parties in the society to cooperate on that important part, because only jointly and together we can spot certain patterns and we can spot certain behaviors and act effectively upon those. What is next? We are well positioned, but this definitely, as well as our role and responsibility of protecting the value, does not allow any self-complacency. We are to keep on being focused. We have to keep on learning. We have to be reacting and actually adapting our business model to the environment.
As I said at the very beginning, environment is fast changing and it's changing in an uncertain way. Only with a strong risk culture of all of the people in the group, we are able to detect, to be aware, to understand and to act upon the risks of the future. Definitely emerging risks of non-financial side are the ones that deserve special attention. However, let's not forget that also the economic world around us has changed. Our clients have changed their business models. The way how we look at credit risk has changed. We need to be adaptive to those. We have to learn and to adapt our frameworks to be able to manage those.
My priorities and priorities of the risk management organization for the future will be on ensuring that our risk management is furthermore even more effective and efficient. What does it mean? Look at our processes, our risk processes end to end, our customer processes end to end, and make sure they're as digitized and as automated as possible in order to decrease the operational risk that might arise. Out of those, in order to leverage an effective risk-based internal control system behind that. My second priority, we want to be forward-looking. We don't want to remediate, we want to act before it happens. This is specifically important in the context of uncertainties, in the context of fast change, and we have to have the right skills, the right people, clearly the right governance and organization to act upon those.
Last but not least, we are here as well to enable opportunities. Banking is about risk-taking. We need to understand which risks we can take because we know how to manage. Here, I'm happy and ready to support as well our changing customers' behavior in order to adapt our processes, adapt our products, in order to be able to excel in that experience, but as well to support the wholesale banking strategy of capital velocity. It all adds to the capital generation. Most importantly, and also personally very important for me, is sustainable finance. Is how do we ensure and enable the transition financing? I'll stop where I started actually on the uncertainties around us and on the need that we all act as a risk organization. ING is risk organization.
Each of us is a risk manager in interest of all of our stakeholders and to ensure that we continue protecting value in a way that we've done so far, but as well, learning from our mistakes and adapting ourselves and our behaviors for the future. I'll stop here, and I'm happy to take any of your questions during the Q&A session. I would actually invite now Tanate Phutrakul to the virtual stage, and I hope I will be able to do that. Thank you very much.
Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Very nice to join you. First of all, as Mark mentioned at the beginning, COVID is still with us and sadly COVID is still with me, so I'm recovering. I'm getting better, but I'm sorry I can't be there in person to meet with you as well. Let me give you a bit of a kind of reflection about what Steven said about strategy, the economic environment that we face and how we have set our financial targets as part of this investor update. The first thing that I wanted to really say is that we have demonstrated a track record of dealing with the environment that we find ourselves in. In the past five years, it's been a very different environment, an environment of negative interest rates.
Where since 2019, we have lost over EUR 1.4 billion of liability income. But when you look at our top line, it hasn't moved. In fact, it has increased. It has increased because we have lent more money and we have grown our loan book. It has increased because we maintain pricing discipline. It has increased because we have taken steps to change our asset mix. It has increased because we have fundamentally changed the way we sell our services to our customer and generated new fee revenues which have grown the fees to compensate for this compression in liability income. Last, but certainly not least, we have also seen the ability to control costs. For the last 3 years, our expenses have remained approximately flat.
Now, if you look at the world around us, we have seen something which is incredibly different. The world is certainly more uncertain than before, and it brings with it benefits and also challenges. The interest rate curve is different. Inflation is certainly much higher than before, and economic growth has become much more uncertain. That raises the question for us as a management, what does this mean in terms of potential loan growth going forward? With rates rising so sharply, then we also see a potential compression and a potential normalization of our lending margin. That's a second big question for us. The third one, clearly, we will benefit from liability income increase because of higher rates, but how much would we benefit?
Lastly, of course, with inflation running at the pace it is running, how would that affect our cost base, despite the programs and the efficiencies that we already realize and plan to realize in the future? Now, let me take you through some of these, different items. From a lending perspective, ING is prepared for a more uncertain outlook on loan growth. We have shown in the past that we have been able to grow our loans at twice the GDP growth. In the future, we expect our lending franchises, our customer intimacy to remain in place, that we can continue to grow the loan. Clearly the outlook where the GDP is looking is more uncertain.
We think that we are targeting what we call profitable growth, only lending where it meets our risk parameter and only lending when we actually make the right return on equity that we need to achieve. Another point which I think is important to note is that as rates starts to rise quickly, there's a possibility that it takes us some time to reprice the loan to the level where we maintain our lending margin. Okay? You see that in a number of markets with mortgage products where we are repricing multiple times in several months to try to pass on the increased 10-year rates to our customer, for example. In a particular market, the Netherlands, we do see another structural shift in terms of NIM. It's because we used to benefit from prepayment fees and that will be structurally less going forward.
Having said that, for the Netherlands, the increase in liability income should keep the overall net interest income for the Netherlands resilient over this planning period. Now switching to liability side of the balance sheet, how does ING benefit from rising rates? I like to say that we are actually geared to rising rates. When you look at the total liability income of ING of EUR 670 billion, about EUR 460 billion of that is subject to replication. Okay. Of that EUR 460 billion, about 75% is in savings, which carries an interest and 25% carries no interest. These are payment accounts held by our customer. To give you a sense why we're geared to rising interest rate, we change the duration of our liability replication depending on interest rate outlook and depending on customer behavior.
Now, as rates are to rise, you can imagine that the duration of the liability replication gets shorter, okay? As seen here, currently, given the current rates and behavioral client behavior expectations, we have 40% of our replication less than one year. The remainder sits from the one-year mark all the way to 15 years. We are here to take advantage of rising interest rates. Now, what does it mean for ING? When you take the curve in April, you see already that from a spot curve perspective, we already will benefit from rising long-term rates. When the short-term rates move, we will benefit more. If you apply the April forward curve, you can see that the impact on ING's financials would be very significant, okay?
That significant increase in liability income will not, of course, be there because we would expect to pass on a certain portion of this benefit to our depositors. To give you a sense of scale of how much tracking would mean to our financial results, we provide you today with a bit more information that for every 10 basis points of tracking that we do, it provides EUR 350 million of transference of value from our replicated book to our depositors. Okay. The second thing which is important to recognize is the fact that negative charging is likely to end when rates go positive. That has already seen a number of announcements by ING, first in Germany a few weeks ago, that we are stopping negative rates charging in September. The same in Belgium in September as well.
This morning we have announced for our largest franchise, the Netherlands, that we will stop negative charging at the beginning of October. Now, if you put some of these components together and do a simulation of 50% tracking, you can see here that what that would mean in terms of the results of our NII replication, taking also into account the stopping of negative rates charging as well. Switching to fees. We are confident on the progress that we have made in terms of our fee generating model. ING's fee generating model is very different than it was 3, 4 years ago. We have a much broader base of customers who take services from us, who pay us a fee. The geographical spread of our fee generating income is much broader.
You have seen that from Pinar and Aris and Andrew, that we basically generate more fees across many, many geographies and not dependent in one particular geography. Another important point is that we generate fee income from a much greater variety of products than before, and that we have a much better balance between wholesale banking and retail banking fees. I think the resilience of our model has improved significantly in the last few years. That's why we're confident in giving that guidance of 5%-10% fee income. Turning to costs. Clearly, inflation outlook is uncertain. It could be even higher than this. It may not normalize, this is our going in planning, projection of what inflation would look like. Our guidance is that we will maintain costs below inflation. We're confident in giving this guidance because of what has been described today.
We are optimizing our branch network. We're optimizing our channel. You have seen us taking steps in terms of reducing our focus from high cost-income ratio countries like Czech, like Austria, like France. You have seen us taking steps in terms of scalable ops and scalable tech. These are key components that give us the momentum to continue to bring efficiency and effectiveness to our operations. Last but not least, we also do expect that when the Deposit Guarantee Scheme is filled in a number of markets as well as the SRF Fund is fully reaching its target, we will get a reduction in 2024 in terms of regulatory cost contribution, we should add to our cost numbers becoming below inflation as well.
If you look at interest rates, rising interest rate, strong, robust fee income growth, cost discipline, it gives us more confidence to reach the 50-52 cost income ratio by 2025. We give this graph to illustrate it would not be a hockey stick at the end. We expect to make progress every year. Talking about capital, we are committed to continue to provide an attractive shareholder return. To give you a bit of our thinking around capital, we have used a sell side consensus forecast to give you a sense of how we would deploy capital. If you look at these consensus forecasts, it talks about a generation of additional capital by ING between 2022-2025 of roughly EUR 20 billion.
On top of which, we already sit on an excess capital level above our 12.5% Core Tier 1 of EUR 7 billion. Our commitment is that we will make the distribution of our capital based on our normal dividend policy of EUR 10 billion in this particular simulation. Also, in addition, we would actually converge on 12.5 and pay out the EUR 7 billion of excess capital over that period of time as well. What to do with the remaining EUR 10 billion? Well, we will use that to increase lending growth. We will use that for counteracting or compensating for negative risk migration. We will use that for certain regulatory add-ons or new regulations that may come. We will use that potentially if there's inorganic opportunity for us to grow.
Of course, if we don't use it for these different components, we will certainly look at additional capital returns to our shareholder. The glide path that we look in terms of this convergence on 12.5, we expect to do it in roughly equal steps during this period. Now, bringing it all together, I'd just like to reiterate our financial targets. We think with the rising interest rates that we have seen, the strong fee growth that we are experiencing and we expect to continue to achieve, we expect to make our 3% cost/income growth over the period. Our cost discipline, combined with that income growth, will deliver the 50%-52% cost/income ratio, and that we expect to actually reduce our capital level to 12.5 by the end of the period.
A combination of all that should deliver a 12% return on equity for our shareholders. Thank you very much, and I hand it back over to you, Mark.
Well, I'm sure he can still hear me, but thank you very much in good health and hope to see you back soon. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll have a short break. For those on the online webcast, you can already ask during the whole time on the right-hand box on your screen, put in your questions for the Q&A, which we'll start, as I said, in 20 minutes. See you then. Thank you. Welcome back, everyone. Again, may I please ask for you who had the urge to put their cell phones back on again, to switch them off again, for this Q&A, which will take roughly one and a half hour. We have questions coming in in a couple of ways.
Of course, here in the audience, our analysts and shareholders present here today to ask questions. There are microphones available that will be brought to you. Please wait 'til you have the microphone for the benefit of our online audience, because otherwise they won't be able to hear you without it. Second source is through the questions that are coming in via the chat function in our webcast. Some of the analysts who, as I said in my introduction, were unable to fly here because of logistical problems with flights and airports, they might be joining us virtually, as they may raise their hand in our virtual room to ask questions. Ready to start. If there's any questions here in the audience, Raul.
Hi, good afternoon. It's Raul Sinha from JP Morgan. Thanks very much for doing this in person. Maybe two questions to start with. The first one is maybe, Steven, just on the geographic spread of the group. This has been an opportunity to reassess strategy and think about the future. How comfortable are you with all of the countries that ING is still present in, even though you've got very high Net Promoter Scores in most of them? You know, do you feel like this is the core group that will remain, or are you still open to changing the footprint if economic conditions or something within strategy could change over the next few years? Maybe related to that, if you could talk about the decommissioning of the IT systems.
I mean, that's something that we've heard ING talk about quite a bit, and a lot of other banks have talked about it, as well. I think banks find it very hard to actually fully decommission IT systems. If you could give us some maybe detail on when, especially Belgium, Netherlands, the kind of key IT systems go away. That's actually the first question.
No, those are two questions. I'm used to that, so go ahead.
The second one is, Tanate, just to make sure that he doesn't feel left out. I think the general summary from the market is that the interest rate sensitivity slide probably underplays the overall sensitivity of ING, NII to the current forward curve. Related to that, can I ask Tanate for a clarification? The EUR 461 billion of replication Eurozone excludes the equity element of ING, which is also in Eurozone, which would be an additional NII sensitivity on top of that. Thank you.
As we also do with the quarterly figures, I will take the first question. I think this time, Ron, I gave you the second question about, and I was smiling because actually we have decommissioned the mainframe of IBM in the Netherlands, and I still intend to send part back to where it came from, but as a present. It's indeed tough. Let me talk about the footprint first. Like I said, the footprint is not. The footprint choice is an end of a choice. If you, like we said, when you decide and see that despite what we hoped for after the ECB came to power in 2014, that would lead to regulatory integration, but instead has led to regulatory fragmentation.
It also means that what you then need in terms of your system requirements, data, and I come back to system requirements, to let's say your liquidity capital requirements, your data requirements, and your product requirements remain different. With that, to some extent, also some system requirements remain different in that it means that if you have a certain mortgage requirements for a country like Germany that is different from Belgium, Netherlands, it also means that the data you require in your systems and the functionalities are different as well. That in turn then means that you actually require local scale. Because if you can't realize local scale, where the bulk of your cost sits local due to all the things that I said, then you can never reach sustainable profitability.
Now, that means that since I became the CEO, we've re-looked carefully in terms of where can we make it, where can we not make it? We've taken decision in that regard on Austria, on Czech Republic, and on France. That's where we currently are. We work very hard to further digitalize our offering because it also lowers the cost to serve it also to the remaining markets. I will always keep looking if through the cycle we can make adequate returns. You saw on the graph what I thought adequate returns was, which is at least above 10%. If I do not believe that in the medium to long term, we can get to the 10%, we will take decisions.
If we think we can make it, we continue to invest, and of course, we still have some way to go on some of the markets. If we get all these digital elements that Ron and Marijn talked about on the road, we actually can benefit and get our cost to serve low. That's why we also put on the slide the cost-income ratio of the diverse markets. Ron, can you say something about your journey of decommissioning and your confidence in the future?
Yeah. My confidence in the future is very much based on, let's say, proven performance in the past. As you mentioned, and I like the question actually, many banks, many enterprises actually have made a lot of claims about decommissioning, taking out applications, closing down data centers. As Steven already mentioned, we have actually fully decommissioned our mainframe. The mainframe in the Netherlands alone hosted like 50% of all of our applications. We, over longer periods, were able to fully decommission that and in the process, modernize our IT landscape. You saw that on the slides. I said 34% of all our applications today already reside on a Private Cloud, and this will increase to 70%. As we do, we further standardize and consolidate all of our IT landscape.
We'll actually close down our data centers in Belgium and have fully migrated all of our applications from Belgium to the Netherlands by the end of this year, which is again, yet another proof point of that we are actually actively standardizing and consolidating. I believe that should provide you with sufficient confidence that this is not a future promise, but it's actually past performance.
Okay. Tanate Phutrakul?
Okay. Thanks, Steven. I think with respect to NII, clearly there is a certain expectation of whether we're understating or not. I think if you look at the curve that we use, April, clearly if you use June, then the curve would be significantly bigger. I take that observation. To answer your question, the equity is not replicated indeed. The impact on equity is on top of what you see in the replication now. Just to make that point that the equity replication is of significantly longer duration than savings because that's a long-term part of our capital stack.
Thank you very much.
Benoit, please.
Yes. Benoit Petrarque from Kepler Cheuvreux. The first one is actually on the capital distribution.
Can you refer to the conversions towards the 12.5%, in equal steps? I wanted to understand maybe if you can more about the short- and medium-term 2022, are we going to see capital distributions already by the end of the year? Do we have to think about 2023 as a first step? That's the first one. Maybe moving to retail and the primary customer growth. We have seen a kind of slowdown over the past two years. Obviously you have COVID and so on, but you know, I wanted to understand better how you're going to you know, move towards the 17 million. Which country you are aiming for or targeting there.
Could you also tell a bit more about the cross-selling? Because I think we have a lot of primary customers already now. Just wanted to understand how you're going to target more cross-selling going forward. Linked to that, it would be great to get an update on the insurance plan with AXA. Obviously a couple of stuff changed already, so just wanted to get an update on that. Thank you.
Okay. Tanate Phutrakul, why don't you go first? I saw this question coming, I guess, on the capital distribution. Then I think ours on the primary growth, fees and insurance.
Okay. Hi, Benoit. I think your answer is about 2022. We have upcoming, of course, our interim dividend in August. We still have a share buyback program that's running. After that, I think we're open. We will ask would we not do a capital return again in 2022? The answer is no. We're definitely open for that, but we will need to have a constructive dialogue with our regulators about this pace of return. It's certainly an open question for us for 2022.
Okay. Aris, you wanna take one?
Yes, indeed, there was a slowdown, and I would contribute that slowdown to two things, probably. One would be COVID, of course, but also our focus on KYC and limiting amount of customers we wanted to onboard as we got our KYC processes up and running. I think those two were the primary effects. If you look at the rate of primary customer growth prior to that, it was growing at a rapid clip and had a good trajectory. Going forward, where we see the primary growth, I think in Market Leaders, we have a substantial number of primaries. It's more about cross-sell. It's more in Germany and in the other C&G markets where we see big opportunity, particularly with Germany.
Now that we're earning on liabilities again and we'll earn on liabilities, we're gonna leverage that to also drive more customer growth in, but smart customer growth, customers that can not be mono savers. In terms of insurance, you mentioned AXA. We recently decided to stop the program that we had with AXA to develop a centralized digital insurance proposition, which would then serve multiple markets. It was just very getting very complex and very difficult to materialize and got to be expensive also. What we're doing now is we have a strong insurance business that's local in every country. We've been growing insurance last year, this year, double-digit. We're having more local relationships, even with AXA in countries. We're going back on a local basis where we have local partnerships with multiple providers.
We focus with two or three multiple providers, but it's still a big opportunity for us to grow. You heard Pinar Abay this morning about the penetration. We still have room to run. It's again, going back to the more traditional local partnerships to drive insurance penetration.
Okay. Thank you very much, Aris Bogdaneris. Let's also turn to our audience online for questions. There's one question via the chat, and that's for Ljiljana Čortan. You seem to be managing the controls of our Russian exposure quite well with the reduction, but what can you say about the secondary effects, and how much of your portfolio will be in scope?
Yeah. Thank you, Mark. Definitely, we have had a look clearly right after the direct impact onto the indirect impact that we have covered all of the segments actually by looking into it. We have defined group-wide some I would say objective criteria how to look at it in order to standardize this analysis. I just give an example of criteria like clients that have revenues above certain percentage coming from Russia, or clients that are experiencing significant supply chain disruptions because of the Russia, or clients that are having strong energy cost inputs for their own production or are within the energy industry, like for example, utilities. We've done that both for the wholesale banking part and for the business banking part.
What we actually looked at is actually what part of the portfolio that we have looked at, if I remember by heart, the numbers of the scope was around EUR 200 billion for the wholesale banking and actually full business banking in Netherlands and Belgium. We have actually come to the conclusion that the inflow in the watchlist, so potential inflow of the watchlist, would be actually less than it was the outflow due to the pandemic. Actually, we would not experience increase in the watchlist. How much of this would really come to the impairment in case the situation does not develop well, depends as well on the response from the governments with respect to the subsidies to the certain industries, but as well to the alternative sources of supply chains and alternative sources of finding the revenue market.
For the time being, we are confident that our levels of the watchlist will not significantly change, and we are currently looking as well at the structure of the overlay that we are having in place and going forward, how to manage this secondary impact.
Okay. Thank you very much. Back to the audience here. Giulia?
Thank you very much. Two questions from me as well. Following up on, you know, the footprint. On the slide on capital, inorganic growth was mentioned. What could be the potential target there? If a traditional retail banking, you know, brick-and-mortar bank were to come to market, would you in one of your markets look at it? That's my first question. On the 3% revenue CAGR, that's maybe more for Tanate, but if I understand it correctly, it's predicated on five-year swap at 1% by 2025, which is basically half where it is now. What would it be if, you know, we look at the curve today? Thank you.
Okay. Thanks so much, Giulia. Yeah, I mean, like I said before, I mean, typically we have enough room to grow organically. If I look at inorganic growth, then we would look at certain skill sets or certain products that we do not have. For example, you still see that the number of customers that do certain fee business with us and certain product propositions with us than only lending is quite small. We still have room to grow. Pinar mentioned that is 6% and 10% on that one. We have still enormous amount of untapped potential in our current customer base.
If I see an opportunity to widen the product or service that we can work with our clients, I will take a look at that. The second point is that is about, I would say local consolidation. Yes, we take the premise that retail is from a product, capital, liquidity until now at least, and I still hope that at some point in time we get harmonized regulation, but let's not speculate. It also means that if local scale is important, then if there are opportunities coming in some markets where I can add to a local scale, as a result of which I will get more efficient and get cost efficiency or broaden my product base, I will certainly have a look at that.
Whether that would be a brick-and-mortar bank, I find that doubtful. We are a digital bank, so if that then would need to come with big restructuring, never say never, but I'm not a big fan of that. We want to build on a digital proposition, and I do not want to get distracted in doing big business integrations and big restructurings, because that is detracting us from the core value that we have, and that's with the customer. Tanate.
I mean, Giulia, your question on NII and revenue growth of 3%. Clearly, if you were to apply today's prevailing rate, it would be better, okay? There's two compensating factors that we think about it as management. Number one is what rising rates will mean for lending growth and prospects for lending growth, and what does it mean for NII on lending, right? It's a bit of a communicating vessel. To answer your question is, indeed, it would be with rising rates higher than 3%, but you need to factor that in on the fact that you will get some compression on lending growth as well. It's a communicating vessel and, of course, we will update that from time to time, as we always do in our quarterly numbers.
Okay. Thank you very much. I'll do a bit of tennis, left room, right room. Anke, please.
Thank you very much. It's Anke Reingen from RBC. Two questions. First is on fee income and the growth in daily banking fees. I mean, banking is a commodity, so how confident are you you'll be able to implement those fees? Or is it largely because driven by your growth of primary customers? The growth in investment products fees, is that related to the market, or is it independent with you growing your customer base, the cross-selling that will be coming through? Secondly, on capital and your assumption on risk-weighted asset growth, is that in line with the 3% revenue growth, and your near 12% ROE target? Is the capital releveraged to the 12.5%, or you still have the EUR 10 billion of capital? Thank you.
Tanate, why don't you start with that capital question, and maybe, Pinar, you wanna have a first go at fees and-
Sure.
the current accounts.
Yeah.
Anke, if I could just ask you, your first part of the question was clear to me about whether we factored in the risk-weighted asset growth in line with 3%, but the second part on capital, I didn't get. Can you repeat the question?
The second part, Tanate, was about how to get to a 12% ROE, do we assume 12.5% CET1 capital, or do we still keep the EUR 10 billion on our books, which was on one of the slides?
Yes. To answer that second part directly, yes. We assume that we get to 12.5% Core Tier 1 in our calculations to get to 12%. In the first one, we have given a certain number of assumptions to get there in terms of Risk-Weighted Assets. For lending growth, we say that if in certain simulation the economy would turn, risk migration would result in higher risk weight. We've factored that in. We've made certain estimations on regulatory impact, you know, the calendar provisioning and the backstop, as some people call it. We factored that in as well as potentially other regulatory add-ons. We have done a quite conservative and comprehensive
Look at where Risk-Weighted Assets would end. The point is we are planning to get to that 12.5% to get to 12% ROE.
Yeah. On daily banking fees, first of all, we are very confident that our daily banking proposition, which is primarily mobile, instant, and personalized, is actually quite competitive, right? In markets especially where we have such a good offer, we also benchmark it against competition, and we are quite confident that there's still room, given also the greatness of the offer and also price competition, that we can further improve it, and expand the daily banking fees. We will closely follow up improvements in our offer and also the competition. The fee CAGR that we shared, we are quite confident, but it varies in terms of how much of it will come in different markets that we operate. The blended daily banking fee growth, we are quite confident.
I think your second question was on investments. On investments, we have different types of investment offerings from mass retail to affluent clients and private banking. In Germany, for instance, our offer is more based on execution only and simpler advice, whereas in Benelux we have that, and on top of it we have a private banking offer. As I explained, part of it will come from penetration of our existing client base, because we know, for instance, both in Belgium but also in Netherlands, not all of our clients invest with us. We also know why they do not invest with us, because we do not have all of the product offerings we were actually supposed to have, which we actually now completed. That's part of it.
Primarily it is penetration-driven, and in our growth, we did not make assumptions on equity markets growth. It's primarily based on marketing flow, client inflow.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. I'll get back to all of you, but just looking at that we have everyone also covered on our webcast and if any questions that have come in. Just looking whether someone wants to ask a question there. Not for the moment, let's move back to the audience and, Tarik, please.
Hi, it's Tarik El Mejjad from Bank of America. Thank you for taking my question. I have two questions. First, the big issue ING had is the pressure from negative rates, and for you was amplified by the fact that you have high reliance on NII, given your business model of savings gatherer. I mean, now you enjoy a few years of high rates. I'm an analyst, I'm thinking about the new next cycle already. Don't you think it's a great opportunity given the excess capital you have to look for some insurance business in life and non-life or proper asset management to increase your fee parts of the revenues? I mean, we discussed a lot of fees today, but it remains very.
5%-10% growth, but given we start from very low base, it will take many years to rebalance the NII fees. As a strategic question, would you consider going back into proper insurance and asset management business? That's the first question. Second question is for Andrew on the wholesale banking. I mean, 10% is a good improvement to ROE, but given the volatile nature of that business, cyclical lumpy on cost of risk, but also in terms of growth, is there, what's the way to go actually above 10%? Do we need probably more in-depth restructuring of the business in some areas? Or you think just 10% is the first step, and then you are confident you can grow it further? Thank you.
I'll take the first question. He has a little time to think about it. Yeah, Tarik, I mean, look, it's a good question, and I'm actually. The people, there's also colleagues here in the room. Actually, I'm happy you raised this question. We rehearse these ones, that people feel the pressure in continuing to grow our fee business.
Mm-hmm.
That's good. The question is more whether we should own products or whether we should distribute products. I think that, Tarik El Mejjad, you refer back to the past when we still owned an insurance business and we owned an asset management business. Many of these businesses are about scale, and I think for us, the way to go for now is, you're right, if you look at our insurance business and even our asset management business, although our asset management is now approximately EUR 180 billion, which is significantly higher, I think EUR 80 billion higher than two or three years ago. For a bank our size, it's still relatively small.
What we want to do now is to optimize the customer experience to move from simple fee products and simple investment products and leverage our distribution channels as much as we can. I'm more looking at how we can broaden a product offering on our distribution channels than necessarily going back now and buy an insurer or buy an asset manager. We keep thinking. Andrew.
To your question, firstly, we don't feel that we need to restructure the business. If anything, what we feel we need to do is take advantage of the opportunities ahead of us. As I said in my presentation, the cost-income ratio is in the low 50s end of last year, just over 50. We think we can sustain that level of cost-income ratio. It comes back to the levers that we need to pull to try and drive that 10% ROE. On the income line, you know, we saw an encouraging pickup in revenue last year, and we need to see how the revenue continues to build.
What we are also doing in a very selective way is looking at how we, be it in our sector organization with our client teams and our product area, start building adjacent capability that will seed further growth on the income line. That's on the income. I think on capital, we do need to continue to be ever more efficient. I talked about the capital side of the equation, and we made progress in that exhibit, but we need to continue to make sure that we get more income from our risk rates from our clients. For me, it's more organic. I think when we disaggregate the cost base, it materially, we generate good returns. There's another aspect which is a subset of what Tanate Phutrakul talked about around net interest income.
You know, we do have a leading Pan-European cash management business, be that in bank business clients or our broader transaction services platform. Actually, that creates a little bit of an income following wind that also will help, augment, returns as well. We're gonna need to work those different levers. I do think back to the risk point, because you talked about volatility, two aspects on risk. Our financial markets business is a client flow-based business. We think that that provides good, stable client-based growth over time. Then on the risk side, you know, we continue to run good prudent through the cycle risk management. We're gonna focus on those strengths, and we think we put that together, get the teams, thinking about the opportunity ahead of us.
I think we can drive towards that 10% ROE over time.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Sorry. Go ahead.
No, thanks very much. It's always good to remember that we have many of our guidances are Through- the-C ycle Guidance and not point in time. That's something we will have to discuss often. I have someone joining us via digitally, Stefan Nedialkov with the next question. Hey, Stefan. It's nice to see you. Wish you were here.
Hello.
It's nice here, actually. Come over next time.
Thank you. Will definitely do my best. Well, thanks for the Investor Day today, everybody. A couple of questions from London. The first one is on loan growth and NIM implications. You're now pivoting towards a profitable growth guidance rather than the 3%-4%. What does that mean in terms of unprofitable growth? Was part of the 3%-4% unprofitable, just in order to, you know, maybe pick up volumes for a few years? What's the benchmark for profitable growth going forward? Is it the 10% in wholesale and 18% in retail, obviously, depending on the country? How should we think about the change from 3%-4% to an actual number going forward?
I guess related to that is, if I just run some very sort of back of the envelope numbers, on your 3% revenue target, and the 5%-10% fee growth target. It looks like NII, on the current curve is projected to grow around 1%-2%. And if we assume 1%-2% loan growth, you're basically saying flat NIMs in a rising rate environment going forward. Some color on that would be really, really welcome. Are you basically saying that lending margins are coming in? Are there any hedging impacts that, you know, maybe we should be thinking about? That's on loan growth and NIM. Apologies for the many, many questions in there. The second one on inorganic growth.
You guys mentioned inorganic growth as a potential deployment of your capital of around EUR 10 billion. Obviously, depending on where loan growth ends up being, you will be consuming some of that for loan growth. When it comes to inorganic growth, are you thinking something along the lines of disrupting the German SME markets, potentially getting a foothold in the country? Are you thinking maybe something non-banking related, or are you just keeping the powder dry for the moment? Thank you.
Okay. I'll give Tanate Phutrakul a little bit of time to think about why we do unprofitable loan growth in the past and how he can revert from that statement, although he did not make that statement. I will first answer the question on the inorganic growth. Look, clearly, Germany for us is an attractive market, and it's still very much a market that's where there's many players. Although we are a Top 3 player, if you look at the composition of the market, I think the market is still way too compartmentalized. At some point, and that goes for many of the retail markets in Europe, consolidation is bound to happen at some time. I'm skeptical, given the limitation of the banking union progress, about cross-border integration.
I'm more hopeful about local mergers, if you will, so that we first start with local integration before we see Pan-European moves. Although, because of the compartmentalization of liquidity and capital in Germany, and I think that was also said by Aris, we want to build local scalable businesses, and we have three pillars to do that in. First of all, is private individuals. In Germany, we're already big, but the number of primary customers we have, 9 million customers. How many were primary?
EUR 2.3 million.
No, there were less even on the slide.
Really?
Nevertheless, it's small, so we need to increase that number. Two, we have an attractive wholesale bank, but that's just part of the network, and their local scale is not necessarily of importance. I just look at it client by client and the global client profitability supported by the network and the sector. The third one is the SMEs. Let's say the business banking customers. There we have only a very limited presence. If there are opportunities to actually grow in all of the business lines, I will look at it. Of course, I'm building a third pillar. The third pillar is still very small, so if there are something attractive for us and primarily digital, then I will for sure take a look at it.
Stefan Nedialkov, to address your question about lending. What we mean by that is when you look at the current interest rate environment, you have to probably reprice your loan quite sharply to capture your origination margin. I take mortgages, for example, in Germany, you probably reprice five, six times to try to pass on the cost to our mortgage taker. But at the same time, if the pricing isn't good enough, you could actually get sub ROE returns for that marginal book, right? That's what we mean. Again, we're not chasing market share. We're gonna stick with our pricing discipline to make sure whatever generated loans that we make, we make the right returns. It depends, of course, on different products, what that returns will be.
In mortgages, it would be on the high end given the low Risk-Weighted Assets. That's to address your question about what we mean by profitable growth. We just don't see the visibility to give the same 3%-4% guidance we gave, given the economic uncertainty. Now, if you look at the questions on Net Interest Margin and what that means, clearly 2022 is a year of rotation, right? With repricing on savings turning around, and also there's a number of factors that is affecting our results. Don't forget we benefit significantly in 2021 from TLTRO funding, right? That benefit will fade out over time. The ECB provides banks with tiering benefits that will also fade out with liability going above zero, right?
There's a number of factors that goes in, but I think we expect our Net Interest Margin to stabilize in 2022 and starts to rise going into 2025.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thanks, Stefan.
Please.
Hi, it's Guillaume Tiberghien from BNP Paribas Exane. Thanks for taking the questions. Two questions. One again on revenues, and the other one on capital. On capital first, your local supervisor is a little bit harsher than average in Europe. If Countercyclical Buffer returns, is there a risk that by 2025, your 12.5% Equity Tier 1 target might not be enough of a buffer to MDA? The second, you listed just some reasons why there would still be headwinds to NII. But simplistically, the EUR 2 billion incremental revenues, give or take, that you target between now and 2025 is fully explained by the Replication Portfolio as at April rates. Fee growth, volume growth is basically offset by other elements.
I know TLTRO and deposit tiering are some explanations, but what other elements are there for the margin pressure? Thank you.
Okay. Tanate, I think that's two times you.
Okay. The Countercyclical Buffer, indeed, we have observed a number of local regulators increasing the level of Countercyclical Buffer, the latest one being our DNB in the Netherlands. I think the way we look at targeted capital ratio is a long-term target that is used to help us price and control our businesses, right? We don't move those ratio easily with these Countercyclical Buffers. We look at a macro picture. We look at stress testing that inform us what is the right capital level. We have talked about potentially increases in Countercyclical Buffer, but in the Eurozone, there's also talk about compensating release of buffers as well, right? It's a multifaceted discussion. Where we're comfortable to guide right now is on that 12.5%.
If there's significant changes in the future, we will monitor, and we will look at it then. Your second question is really. You're saying if we increase our replication by 50% or based on 50% tracking, there could be even more potential. I would agree, given where the rates are. Exactly what I said is that rising rates beyond normalization of rates that we see could bring slower growth in lending. It could bring compression in terms of lending NII, right? That's some of the potential downside in terms of Net Interest Margin. I don't want to say we're not bullish about our Net Interest Margin. We do expect this year to stabilize, and we need to grow. We have taken some conservative assumptions over that period of time of how we get to 12% return by 2025.
Yeah. Thank you very much.
Oh, sorry, Flora. You were too slow, Cor.
Don't give the mic to Cor.
Hello. Flora Bocahut from Jefferies. The first question is again on the NII. Sorry to come back to this. You've made the assumption in the slide pack of a 50% pass-through. You kindly give us the sensitivity for each 10 basis point move in the 10% move in the pass-through. So how should we think about it? You know, I think you mentioned it. It's gonna vary across the different geographies. So where do you think it could be best, worse? Is the 50% number realistic, or is it one of the conservative elements you just alluded to? The second question, still on NII, is the prepayment fees. I don't know if you've ever quantified actually the prepayment fees, but this may be also a headwind, you know, versus the 2021 base.
How big is it? Should we consider that the Q1 NII was already clean and normalized, maybe on that basis? Thank you.
Tanate, why don't you take the first question and let me then take the second first. On prepayment, I think that, look, over the past number of years, we were benefiting, especially in this market, but also in some other markets, from having higher prepayment fees, as a result of the prepayment that the clients did on the back of lower interest rates. What we will now see, and we saw it already in the first quarter, that the prepayment levels will go down, but also the prepayment fees will go down as well, given the fact that the interest rates are higher, so the differential will be smaller as well. On the other hand, that's going to be offset by the fact that we have more liability income.
In our forecast, we took that part into account as well. We have not disclosed what these amounts were, but we will especially in 2022, we'll face headwinds of the lower prepayment amounts coming in. Tanate Phutrakul?
Flora Bocahut, to address your question on tracking, it really depends on competitive pressure per market. It depends on dynamics of what's happening in other parts of the banking scene as well. If you look at two examples that we have looked at, the UK, right? The tracking is not anywhere near 50% when you're coming from ultra low or negative. Another market in one of our markets is Poland, where again, the tracking has not been there, right? I think if you think 50% is a conservative assumption, I think from what we see now, I would agree, but it really depends on the magnitude of the interest rate. What we see now, if you stay around 1%-2% kind of nominal rates, I think 50% is not a bad assumption to make.
Okay. Thank you very much. Cor. No, excuse me, lady. He's right in front of you. Thank you.
Hi.
No, no pun intended.
Good afternoon, Cor Kluis, ABN AMRO. Although a couple of questions. First of all, on the retail fees, you increased it by EUR 700 million in the last since 2017. Could you give a split out of that? What was the price effect and what was the volume effect? And also for the next couple of years, you have the 5%-10% growth. What part will be price and which is volume? We appreciate volume, of course, a little bit more than just the price part. That's my first question. Second question is about Russia. In Q1, you basically took the big total effect already in your capital. Small part via the P&L, a big part via the RWAs, via the capital.
If later in the year, we don't know what's gonna happen, of course, part of that loss will be recycled via the P&L. It will not be in quarter one impact because you already have it in it. That will impact your profits, and it will impact your payout ratio and therefore your dividends. How do you look to that on returning that capital from that Russia part then? Because your profits will be low, your dividends will be lower. Will that extra profit then be added to the EUR 7 billion? Would you also give an extra share back or an extra capital return because you already have it in your capital? My last question-
Sorry, just to clar-
Yeah.
We already have it in our capital? What do you mean by that?
You increased your RWAs by, I think, EUR 13 billion or something.
Oh, yeah.
in the first quarter.
Mm-hmm.
You already have that Russia effect in the capital. If later, it might result into real P&L losses, your profit, of course, will be under pressure, therefore you will have a lower dividend. But, yeah, that should not impact your capital return because you already have it in your capital, of course. Because your RWAs will probably go up and therefore, or you'll go down and therefore you have a capital release again. It's more will that impact your capital returns if you, yeah, take the Russia profit in your P&L. My last question is about Amazon. In Germany, you did a nice deal, of course, with Amazon. Can you give some update on that? Is it already progressing well?
Are there other countries where you might also, you know, do these kind of operations like in Spain or, you know, you're active in a lot of countries?
Ha. All right. There's two questions coming your way. First of all, can you split the volume and the price effect on the fee for this? Answer no, but I think you should elaborate a little bit of where it is coming from.
Yeah, sure.
In terms of Amazon, we are starting a small SME business. How do we grow from there? I think on Russia, it's not so much a risk question, it's more a dividend question that you're asking. I don't think that I agree with you, but then I will leave the floor to Tanate Phutrakul. I don't agree with you that it doesn't come back in profit, because until now, it's indeed partially we took it away from profit by means of taking additional risk costs. That's up to the tune of EUR 1 billion. Because our Risk-Weighted Assets increased, and therefore, if you translate that, our capital increased or requirements increased with about EUR 1.5 billion.
That does not mean it does not get to our profitability. Currently, it's out there. There is no link with profitability from that second reasoning, the element. The question, of course, remains what will happen if it goes back to normality or whether it goes completely southwards, right? Then the question is, will that then lead to real losses? Therefore, there will be capital release to some extent, and there will be more risk costs, and therefore, the profit will be going down. Well, there'll be a reversal of RWA. That's also not through the P&L, but that's only through RWAs. Therefore, also will it have an impact on the risk costs that we already took. Yeah.
Those RWAs, don't mix them up with profitability because they're neither here nor there from a dividend payout perspective, but they do matter in terms of our capital and therefore our return on equity. Now, to Nate, the question, of course, if you take more or less risk costs, shouldn't you then be getting more or less? You can answer depending on how you think it should be answered.
Yeah, I think the answer is, first of all, our capital as it stands in the end of Q1 already takes into impact about the more negative end of the Russian situation, right? That capital reflection, it's already there. I think your specific question is, if we were to recycle that into the P&L in terms of losses in the P&L, will our dividend be changed? The answer is yes. Potentially our capital returns from other non-dividend could be increased. I don't think it's a straight notion that because if we had to take greater provision that we would actually lose that money, right? It's about the real loss of capital on Russia that matters.
In the end, if we have normal risk costs, and in this case it could be no more risk costs than through the cycle, then the profit is lower, and then the normal dividend is lower.
Yeah.
Let me do the easy one first on the Amazon. Amazon is a partner, of course, that we have a relationship with in Germany, and a strong partner at that. What we do with Amazon, it's a distribution channel. We help finance working capital of small companies on their marketplace, on the Amazon marketplace. We also have direct business to SMEs in Germany. We have other channels where we get volume. The relationship now, it's relatively young. Obviously, we're their only partner now, and we're working well with them. That's not the issue. Obviously, they're in other markets, but again, Germany is a test case for Amazon and also for us to see how this embedded finance.
How we work with them to create volume, more volume for our business. That's where we stand there, and we're progressing. On the other one, it's a good question but a hard one to answer because we make fees in the following ways. We make fees on daily banking, and we can increase prices, or we can introduce new fees that none existed. For example, in Germany, we introduced a EUR 1 fee on Girocard. You know, so you have to look at daily banking. You have asset management. How do you make fees on asset management? Distribution fees and management fees, but also on brokerage, on trades. You get fees on trades. That's a volume and a price thing, depending. You have insurance and you introduce new insurance, you get fees.
You have existing relationships where you renegotiate prices, where you also get higher prices after a negotiation. It's a multifaceted across multiple products, and it's about introducing new stuff, increasing prices on existing stuff and things like that. You know, it's not an easy question to answer, but it's multifaceted. Yeah? Okay.
Thank you very much. Before I go back to the audience, a question from our online audience is to BN. This is for Ljiljana. Can we be more specific? It's a question we got on the phones this morning also. We never guide for risk costs, but we do have a Through-t he-C ycle Guidance. Could you elaborate a little bit on your views there?
Exactly. This is where we're gonna stand as well. We expect going forward to remain Through- the-C ycle Guidance for several reasons. We've navigated pandemic better than we thought, as we all seen. There is still a part of these overlays remained on our balance sheet, and we all know that. That's a part of the something that we are going to use going forward for uncertainties. Secondly, as we've seen also from the volume growth we have done, went down to the lower range of that volume growth because we said we're not gonna hunt for volume. In uncertain times, adding to the profitable growth, we will also not go just to add volumes, but we will also look at the risk behind those.
Having in mind that we have had for several years, if we take out pandemic here and lower cost and really through the cycle, adding to these uncertainties and being a risk manager, I would prefer to keep it at 25 basis points.
Yeah. Hadia, thank you for that question. We have a question here in the audience as well, please.
Hello. Dimitrios Larios, BGM Credits. A few questions on the funding. Is the intention at the moment to reverse the process of charging accounts depositors in Germany and the Netherlands? Do you think that in the current environment, funding via deposits is a bit more meaningful than before? How do you see the TLTRO IV playing out for ING? Could it be more meaningful than TLTRO III in your estimations?
Could what be more meaningful?
TLTRO IV being more profitable than TLTRO III, let's say, in the current environment with higher interest rates.
Okay. I don't know about TLTRO IV, but I'll leave that to Nate. If there is one.
Yes. Well, actually, I mean, no, since I don't think it's good. I think that we went too far out and too long with TLTRO, and I think it was
In hindsight, I think we should not have gone that way because it's creating the wrong incentives in banking, but also for our customers. I will let Nate answer in terms of the benefits of TLTRO. When it comes to the deposits, we already made announcements on Belgium, whereby we will revert back to 0, right? On the Netherlands, we made an announcement this morning whereby we will not charge negative deposits anymore by the first of October. In Germany, I think we made announcements in early May, whereby we went down from 1 million to what was it, Nick?
500.
500.
EUR 500,000. We have made already announcements to that. That's one of the slides which shows how we benefit from replicating portfolio with the tracking of approximately 50%. That includes all those actions. Clearly, I mean, that, of course, we've never said that deposits was not important for us. Like I even said in my speech when we opened, I said there are two reasons why our bank has been also successful, which is a combination of the business and one was diversification. The other benefit is, of course, the fact that we have a very stable retail deposit base. It was only a matter of, in each market is different, that we charge appropriately for it.
Depending on the circumstances of the markets, of the customers, of the pension systems, that we make sure that we balance our balance sheets. Raising deposits has been important for us and has continued to be important for us, even through the pandemic, because there you saw that, I believe in 2020, Tanate, how much did our deposits grow in that year? About EUR 45 billion in aggregate? Yeah?
Yeah.
Even then, the deposit strategy was important. We also, depending on the market circumstances, said, "Look, we need to be able to charge for it because it costs us money, and no business is able to survive long term if we provide a service that costs money, which we cannot charge for." As the curve starts becoming more upward sloping now again, we take it off, and therefore we benefit in a different way and continue to build, because in the end it's about continuing that primary relationship. To Tanate, when are we getting TLTRO IV benefits?
Yes. The answer, Dimitrios Sapountzoglou, is I don't know because I don't think the rules or any new version of TLTRO is out there. I know Christine Lagarde has talked about a new version linked to sustainability loans increases. I think what we are contemplating at the moment is that given where the interest rate rises are and given the terms of TLTRO III, we're debating whether we would repay the current TLTRO III funding or not, or to keep it over another year. That's a bit of the debate that we have. Once we make that decision, we can give you a bit of insights into how beneficial that would be for ING to extend the funding. We are in the process of thinking about that.
Okay. Thank you very much, Tanate Phutrakul. Two questions from our online audience. Thank you. What further RWA inflations are left structurally? That's probably referring to regulatory and the normal ones like growth. The second question, will you consider more buybacks now that for Dutch withholding tax purposes, a big cash dividend has already been paid? Okay. To Tanate Phutrakul, why don't you take the second, and Ljiljana Čortan, you will do the first.
Well, on the RWA inflation, clearly, no one knows what the regulation in the future brings. I would say from this point of time after the second quarter, we have actually taken into account majority of all the regulatory headwinds. Clearly, we will have certain impacts as well going forward from Tanate mentioned NP backstop eventually are the shortfall, but I would say this is not structural, but rather business as usual. Clearly, potentially negative risk migration, again, not structural, depends on if Russia goes out, whether something goes in from the second order impact. I do believe structurally, we've taken the majority or if not all, and the rest is business as usual, we're gonna manage.
Okay, Tanate.
Just on the capital returns. Clearly, our preference, given where our stock trades today, is to share buyback, right? I think it is the best in terms of EPS enhancement. That's what we're focused on doing. As we mentioned at the Q1 results, we are looking for ways to see if we can make that return more flexible and not as linked to the cash return part. That's work in progress for us. Clearly, the preference is capital distribution through share buy.
Thank you very much, Tanate. Farquhar, I saw you with your hand up for quite a long time.
Yeah. Farquhar Murray from Autonomous Research. Two questions, I think probably mainly for Aris Bogdaneris, if that's okay. Firstly, just in terms of slide four of your pack, where you showed the mobile sales were 97 per 1,000 clients. I just wondered if you could decompose how that splits between key product sets, just to give us a sense how it might developed and may develop. Secondly, just on German SME, in terms of the strategy. Can you just outline what the strategy is to overcome the obviously incumbency advantages that some have in that market at the moment? Is it all about this kinda Amazon link up, or is it more than that? Just perhaps on a related question, how much volume on the SME lending side do you expect to take in that kind of German push that you're anticipating? Thanks.
Okay. First question. Let's go to the first.
First is the 97 on mobile sales.
Oh, yeah. Again, here, I don't have the exact figures for you, but it's easy to think about the products that are more readily available on mobile, payment products, deposits. That's where you're getting the bulk early consumer loans. Then as you get higher up the value chain on mortgages.
On asset management products, although we're still working on it, as I told you, in my monologue, where we're trying to link with face-to-face channels to be able to close those sales, but it's primarily the payment and deposit and savings products that are the bulk. Insurance as well, yes. On your question on SME, how do we compete with the incumbent? It's the same logic as how did ING Germany compete with the incumbent bank branch banking businesses when we launched ING Direct.
It's the same idea about the customer experience, the speed, the digital, and tailoring to those SME clients, the smaller end, who don't want to go to a branch to get a loan, and who see speed and convenience as a key CTQ or a key factor in their buying decision. Your question is how much volume? I mean, we don't set market share targets. What we do is, with our risk appetite and with our different industry codes, we look and we learn to build our scorecards and to build scorecards where we can make money and to offer our value proposition because it's a big market. We can be much more selective in Germany than in other places.
It's early days now, and it's really about building those scorecards to be able to understand how these customers react, the pricing, all those things. Yeah.
Thank you very much, Aris. We've got room for one more question. Benoit, please.
Actually, two questions from my side.
All right.
The first one is on the NII. To come back on that, the focus has been on the Eurozone NII. I think 25% of the deposit base is non-Eurozone. So how much kind of additional liability income can we expect from the non-Eurozone countries? That's number one. On the cost side, I see on the slide a 2.3% expected Eurozone inflation, and you will be running below that level in 2023. I was wondering in terms of timing, 'cause there's a bit of a delay in terms of passing kind of the higher inflation into the cost base. I'm thinking about CLAs, also indexation in Belgium is delayed by a couple of months.
Is that not a kind of maybe higher inflationary level on a clean basis in 2023 versus the normal level? Or are you very confident that you will be managing the clean cost lower than the inflation also in 2023?
Yeah.
Thank you.
Let me take first the first question on the cost. Tanate Phutrakul, you probably need to do a real better job in explaining our improvement on our liability income, at least on the non-Eurozone part. No, yes, I mean, we know of course that there's indexation and higher and some countries' indexation levels. We of course see higher inflation levels, and that also means that it may filter through in loan costs as well. Clearly, in terms of what we offer our employees, not only the loan, but also the learnings and the way they can develop themselves here, and we try to do that in the best possible way for our employees. That's maybe number one.
Two, you heard today that we are focusing on scale in retail. It has led us to certain decisions, and the benefits of those decisions are only greatly starting to filter through. It was not necessarily a cost exercise. It was an exercise based on what skill do we require, but as a result of it, also costs are going to come out of the system and those benefits will filter through in 2022 and 2023. As you heard from, well, I think all of the business leaders, including Roel and Marnix, is how we use the digital journeys. Pinar said, "Okay, we need less physical presence based on the preference of our customers." For that, you need to have a good digital offering because you cannot just close branches.
You just have to provide a certain offering, otherwise they look today, sorry, branch is closed, good luck with it. You have to have the same level if not better digital quality of service to be able to do that. All of these scalable tech ops benefits will filter through. What we did is both on the technology side and on the ops side, give you just one example to say, okay, using the cloud will deliver us EUR 100 million benefits in the next couple of years. Again, it's quite linear over the few years. When we use the contact centers, the contact center 2.0, it delivers a benefit of EUR 50 million, also quite linearly benefiting the bank in the next couple of years.
Those are ways that we're able to keep our costs under control below inflation while knowing what the indexation potentially will be in a couple of the markets where we are active based on the current inflation rates. Tanate Phutrakul, liability income-
Yes.
On your own.
If you refer to the chart that talks about liability beyond the Eurozone replication, there are two small parts. There is a part which is related to wholesale banking, BNG, for example. That benefit, of course, is there, and the tracking is there. I think Andrew referred to it in his answer about how we would achieve more than 10%. There is potential upside that he is referring to if rates were to rise and a replication of that would happen. The second part is in our non-Eurozone franchise, so predominantly Poland, Romania, Turkey and Australia. What I can tell you is that the duration for these markets are similar, even shorter than the our duration you see in the Eurozone. They will also positively impact our results. That is already seen.
In certain markets, like in Poland, the tracking speed is actually very slow the way we see it at the moment.
On that note, we're gonna end the Q&A. Thank you very much for all the questions here in the audience and from our online
Let me take this moment also to thank my team and the many ING colleagues that have been helping to realize this day and, of course, you for doing the hard work today. Steven, for some closing remarks, over to you, please.
Yeah. Thank you very much. Let me first say, it was a pleasure to actually finally have you all in a room here today, because I've spoken to many of you individually, and before we stopped traveling, I'd seen many of you individually, and then we've done some conferences also virtually, Giulia. Now to have you all in the same room is also quite an experience for us. Like, you really exist, which is cool. That's one. Secondly, just remember what we told you. We have a couple of innate strengths in ING that we used to deliver the value in the past. We made some clear choices. We had some lessons learned from the past, and we made choices in where do we wanna be in a footprint, where do we wanna invest in improving our customer experience.
That changes a little bit of break from the past, going back to the customer and investing with all the benefits that we can see on getting more customers, getting better customers, more primary customers, and also diversifying our income. Last but not least, we talked about how everything also informed our strategy, not only on the customers, but also on the social and sustainability dimension, and how all the enabling priorities can help us to execute on it. We talked to you about, we showed that to you as well, a number of benefits in terms of what does that then actually mean? Because many people talk about the customer, many people talk about sustainability, many people talk about commoditization of banking services.
It's good, but it also depends on the DNA of the company, how are you able to execute your strategy? What we've shown you is there are a number of these enabling priorities, what are the roadmaps until 2025 or even 2030, and all of the business lines have individual roadmaps on all these elements, so that we're able to execute with discipline. I said that when I started two years ago, and will continue to say that until they throw me out of the place, which I hope is not too soon, actually. With that then leads, if you then listen to all of that, because everybody talked about all these three things to our financial targets.
We talked about our income, our continuation of a focus of diversifying our income, and the fact that we still have a way to go, given the still relatively low number of primary customers compared to our total customers, and the fact that we're able to grow our customers, as well as the fact that we are yet in a low environment still in where we start to charge our customers from the outset, where we really start to step on that gas in 2020. We also shown you some proof points how we get to a 50%-52%. I know that you have been asking me about that for the past number of quarters.
Today, we show you proof of how we're going to get that to 50%-52% by using our technology and operational foundations that will help to drive the cost to serve going down. In the end, by moving to a CET1 ratio of 12.5%, and Tanate said in equal-sized steps in the next four years. I hope that you're happy now. I'm sure that you're happy now. Now you have your target, and you have that date, and you even have a trajectory of what it means in the next couple of years, year by year, then will lead to a return actually of 12%, which we believe is a very effective return for our shareholders and in light of the external environment also compared to our European peers. I want to thank you for coming here.
I wanna thank you also for the people that are not here to address it, for being here with us virtually. I know that some of you wanted to be here but were not able to join. We're very pleased also to have the opportunity to talk to you individually for the next couple of hours, also here while we enjoy a little bit to eat and to drink. I also wish you a very good travel and safe travel back to wherever you came from. Thank you very much.