ING Groep N.V. (AMS:INGA)

AGM 2017

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May 8, 2017

[Foreign language] Dames en heren, geachte aandeelhouders. Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders. We're 30 seconds early. We have shareholders here, representatives of Central Works Council, and also the press will be listening into the meeting. First of all, I will introduce you to a number of people here. On the first row, you will find the members of the executive board from left to right for you, that is Wilfred Nagel. Wilfred Nagel, then Ralph Hamers, and Patrick Flynn, and I'm in the middle. Also this row, you'll find Jan Willem Fink, he's on my right-hand side. On the second row, behind me from left to right for you, we have Mariana Gheorghe, Eric Boyer de la Giroday, Robert Reibestein, Henk Breukink, Isabel Martín Castellá, Hermann-Josef Lamberti, and Ann Sherry. At the side, you'll find the corporate secretary, Ms. Cindy van Eldert-Klepp. On the first row for you on the right-hand side of the room, that's over there in that corner. It might be a good idea for these people to stand every time I call out their name, but we're going to be expedient about this. First of all, Koos Timmermans in the corner, not entirely in the corner. Isabel Fernandez, Aris Bogdaneris, Roel Louff. We have our external auditor of KPMG, Marc Hoogenboom and Guy Barker, KPMG. We have our independent civil law notary, Joyce Leemrijse. Thank you. Furthermore, we have here present for the executive board, Koos Timmermans, I've mentioned his name already, but also Steven van Rijswijk, and we'll be talking about him later on in the meeting. The nominated new members of the supervisory board, Mr. Jan Peter Balkenende, Margarete Haase, and Hans Wijers. We also have the member of the executive board yet to be appointed, Roland Boekhout. Any questions you may have about these new members of the board can be asked under the item of the agenda to that effect. The meeting will be held in the Dutch language, but a number of members of the executive board and the supervisory board can be asked questions in English. You can listen to the interpretation if you want. As approved in the general meeting held on April 25th, 2006, the meeting shall be posted directly on the ING website. I can confirm that the shareholders have been notified to this meeting in accordance with the law and the articles association, the meeting can take due and legal decisions. Shareholders have not made any proposals for items on the agenda of this meeting. A number of formal announcements now. We'll be showing on the screen. I can't see it yet. I'm sure it'll be shown. You'll see the subscribed capital per record date, which is 10 April 2017, and that was rounded off 3.8 billion shares. 3.8 billion shares. Sometimes I don't know whether to say votes or shares. A record of the capital present here today and the proxy votes will be shown on the screen prior to the first vote. The minutes of the meeting of April 25, 2016, have been adopted and signed by the chairman, secretary, and holder depository receipt designated to that effect, Mr. E. Bloemers from Amsterdam. These minutes have been made available on the ING website since October 25, 2016. They've also been made available for perusal in the draft version as from July 26, 2016. Minute taking of this meeting will be done by Ms. van Eldert-Klepp. In order to make proper minutes, we're doing an audio recording of this meeting. Appointment of the shareholder who will co-sign the minutes of this meeting. The proposal is to appoint Mr. Lokabol from Amsterdam as a shareholder who shall co-sign the minutes. Mr. Lokabol. You're over there in the middle. Yes, please remain standing up for a moment so that everybody can see who you are. Thank you very much for taking this job. Can you agree with that? We'll do that by acclamation. Thank you. I confirm that the proposal has been carried. I shall be briefly explaining the procedure at this meeting. We have an extensive agenda. I'm sure you've seen that. We have a strict schedule that we need to comply with. Please make sure that your questions and comments are short and concise so that we can deal with as many questions as possible. Should you have any questions about customer relations or specific services, we have a special desk outside here of the ING where you can ask those questions, and obviously, I assume you will have switched off your mobile phones. Agenda item 2. This is the agenda item that we'll be dealing with shortly. You will see agenda items 2 through and including 2D, and if you see that on the agenda, you will see that first of all, we're going to do all the presentations, one after the other, the presentations of 2 through 2D. We'll do all these presentations, and then you will be able to ask questions in one go about all these items on the agenda under 2. We estimate we'll need about an hour for that, but we'll have to wait and see. We're going to first listen to all the presentations, and then we'll have ample time for Q&A. What we want to do is, and later on I'll explain it again when we deal with the Q&A. Some years, you asked her one question, and you'd get one answer. We also tried another approach that you'd ask all the questions in one go, you'd get all those answers in one go, and the shareholders didn't really like that. Now what we're going to do is try to answer two, three questions in one go. Some people ask two, three questions in one go, and then we will answer those questions, but we try to cluster the answers or the comments. An explanation later on for the vote, or will we be explaining the vote once we're dealing with the vote? Obviously, we're going to vote electronically. We have handsets, and we'll be explaining that, and should there be a problem, we've got people on standby to help you. First of all, we're going to deal with agenda item 2A, which is a report of the Executive Board for 2016. We combined that with a report on sustainability. We will be addressing item 2A and 2B jointly. We also published an explanatory note in our annual report, but now I'd like to give Ralph Hamers the floor to go into the details of his presentation. Good afternoon. Nice to see such a turnout again. I'm delighted that you remain involved with the ING and that you've taken the trouble to come here. This is a special day. It's a special shareholders' meeting because this is the first without the Stichting ING Aandelen. It's also special because of a series of appointments on our agenda, and we'll certainly take ample time for those appointments. They include the departure of two much-appreciated members of the Executive Board, and I'd like to say a bit about that, as others will as well. If we consider that in the midst of the 2009 recession, Mr. Flynn transferred to ING to help ING in our massive restructuring that we were forced to do in transitioning from a bank and insurance company to a bank. Later on, Mr. Nagel joined the Executive Board to help ensure that the transition would proceed properly and that the quest of risks would be curtailed. Now we have a well-capitalized bank with excellent liquidity ratios, good returns, and is carrying out good and highly successful strategies. That's more than partially attributable to these two members of the Executive Board, and I'd like to express a special word of thanks to them here. Now, considering ING's strategy, it bore fruit in 2016 as well. Before we examine those fruits, I'm going to walk you through that strategy, which is quite simple and can be captured on a single page. There are few countries that have that, but we do. The core of that strategy is our purpose, and our purpose is to enable people to stay ahead, both in life and in business. That's what we deal with at the ING. To achieve that objective, we've enhanced the strategy. In that strategy, we focus on improving and on delivering distinctive services because we think it's distinctive services that will ensure that more and more customers keep coming. To make that distinction, we've said that we will keep our promises to the customers day after day. It's hard work, and sometimes we have complaints, but even so, our first promise to customers is that we are simple and transparent about everything we do, and no matter where we serve the customer, we will remain available everywhere all the time. We may not be physically available, but online, we're available 24/7 in today's world. That is supposed to enable customers to do business on their own or to obtain sufficient information to take their financial decisions. At ING, all 54,000 employees promise to make each day just a little bit better. That's our promise to customers, we've identified four priorities. First, we will focus on our primary customer relationship. Second, we will invest in analysis to get to know customers better, because if we get to know customers better, we can serve them better. Third, we need innovations to ensure that those services truly are distinctive. Fourth, to provide timely advice and do right by our customers, we need to think outside the box of traditional banking. That's our strategy on a single page. That's what we instrumentalize day after day, all staff members have that at home, at their office, as a placemat or on their navigator in their car. We do this day after day, it's delivering results. We operate in 48 countries. Because we're so focused on our customers, in seven of the 13 countries where we're present as a total bank, we lead in Net Promoter Score. That's a way of quantifying how customers choose us and whether they recommend to their friends that their friends do their banking with us. That's why in the past four years, ING has obtained 4 million new customers. In addition to becoming customers, those customers are doing business with us in increasing measure. Increasingly, they primarily do business with us, which means that they see us as their bank for all business. That's important. We're a credible bank throughout the banking business. We've seen our customers grow in the past year to nearly 36 million, but we also considered growth of primary relations, that figure is 9.7 million. Those customers bring in business because in the past year, we've managed to support the economies where we operate with EUR 34.8 billion in additional lending. We were able to provide that lending because we received EUR 28.5 billion in additional savings deposits. Focusing on the client is crucial to make ING grow. More is happening in this world. The world that we experienced three or four years ago when we launched the Think Forward strategy, that world is changing very rapidly because of many different aspects. The first one is the regulatory environment, which keeps becoming more stringent day after day. It means that the playing field is not level for ING in terms of banking taxes and additional capital requirements. We have to consider that in our strategy. We can't complain about it. We need to take it on board. We also notice that in our world, growth rates are low, especially in Europe. The interest rates are low and possibly even negative. How do you deal with negative interest rates as a bank? That's crucial in this day and age. It's also a world where the customers no longer consider different products because those banking products have become commodities. If you want to be successful as a bank, you need to deliver distinctive services. That's why clients increasingly do business with us because of our distinctive services. As for today's distinctive services, it's no longer the normal companies that set the standard, it's the tech companies that do it. Nearly all our customers deal with the Ubers and the Airbnbs and the Facebooks day after day. They have raised customer expectations dramatically in terms of convenience in doing business. That's what we need to deliver day after day. We have to offer distinctive services, and that's what we consider the most. Once we have achieved those distinctive services, we have to ensure that the customers know us and that they know what's available. That's why increasingly we need to work as a digital platform, just like all those other successful companies. Because few customers do financial business as a hobby. It's not even my hobby. Financial transactions is a very low priority in terms of pastime. If they engage in financial transactions, they want to do them quickly and properly because most people nowadays spend their time not outside, but online. Who used public transport to get here today? How many of you on the platform where you were waiting or the stop where you were waiting conversed with somebody standing next to you? Very few of you. Do you know why? Because those people next to you are all using this device. This is where their lives take place, and this is where we need to be. That's what our strategy is about. It's that digital network, that ecosystem that combines everything and that ING needs to be known for to attract customers with one brand transcending all countries. That's crucial. Once we have that brand, then maybe we can appeal to those customers who may not visit us every day. Once they've entered a different digital world, if they need a bank, we want them to think of the ING. We have to generate that connection with the other platform, and the brand needs to be first and foremost in their minds. Banking, financial services, ING. All countries in and outside Europe. That's what matters. That's why we announced that we need to invest more than ever in the digital surroundings, because that's where the world is headed. That's an investment that we're going to distribute among these different projects. We're not trying to transition to one single ecosystem all at once. We'll do it in steps, because doing it all at once would be a massive transition. In all the 40 countries where we're present as a corporate bank, we may be doing business in 40 different ways. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but that was the principal assumption a few years ago, and we're a retail bank in 13 countries. We have 13 different apps. 13 of them. Facebook has one global app. Uber has one global app. Why do we need 13 for 13 countries? We want one single app, and as an interim step, we've said we want one type of bank in Belgium and the Netherlands. That's project Orange Bridge or Unite. In the countries we're challengers, such as Spain, Italy, France, Austria, and the Czech Republic, we want to see how we can transition to a single digital bank. In Germany, where we experience such rapid and successful growth, we're going to invest heavily in digitizing our services. We were already highly digital, but we can advance this and improve upon this. In business, we've been working on that for a few years. In business, we see that for all those companies that we do business with worldwide, that same service system, whether they're customers from the Netherlands or from Thailand, their expectations are the same. They want it to be standardized. To achieve this, we've indicated that to continue growing, we're going to invest EUR 800 million in ongoing growth to leverage more on the scale of our platform. At the same time, if you make a scalable platform for growth, you'll notice that you can cut costs in some settings. In October, we announced that we would be cutting costs. Quite honestly, when you cut costs, in many cases, you reduce the number of jobs as well. In October, we announced that we expect that all these projects will affect the jobs of about 7,000 employees. The jobs will change in nature. They may change with respect to location, or the jobs may disappear altogether. Those are not easy decisions. I've been working for the ING for 25 years, and I have a lot of coworkers all over the world. I know that those coworkers are responsible for the success of ING, and that's why those decisions are so unbelievably tough. We have to make sure that at the ING, and when it comes to helping our staff either continue their future in or outside the ING, that we continue to deliver on the reputation we've established over the years by consulting properly with our social partners. If we want to retain those distinctive service, we'll need to improve every day and we'll need to innovate every day. That's why innovation is so essential in our strategy. I want to walk you through a few ideas. First, the Payconiq product. You may or may not have heard of it. If you track us every quarter, you're certain to have heard of it, Payconiq is one of those apps you can download, at least in Belgium, you can download that at present. You can use it to pay by phone in a lot of stores. The app sounds very simple. It is very simple. It's difficult to make something simple, but it's a wonderful service. Nine months after Payconiq was launched, two Belgian banks approached us to support Payconiq and are actively selling it to their customers, and there are 25,000 SMEs and a great many consumers that have started using Payconiq in the past nine months. In the Netherlands, banks have confirmed that they would like to support the ING's initiative in this respect. Another example of innovation in banking is Twyp Cash. In Spain, we have an extremely successful digital bank. We have nearly 3.5 million customers, and we're growing by 4 to 600 new customers every day. If you want to continue growing as a digital bank across the board in banking, people want to be able to withdraw cash too. We can't maintain as many cash machines as some of our Spanish counterparts do, and if our customers use another party's cash machine, that costs them money. We developed the Twyp Cash app, and if you use that app, you can generate a QR code, and you can use that QR code at a petrol station or at a grocer. They'll scan that app and its QR code and give you cash. That's the new style business. Once again, you see simple technological innovation just to improve services to our customers. There are 3,500 places in Spain where they can now withdraw cash. 3,500 thanks to one simple app. It's possible, we're doing it. We've innovated a lot for consumers, but we've also got Start Up in Romania for SMEs. That's an online platform that gives SMEs and startups lots of guidance in setting up a company. In wholesale, in the past year, in addition to integrated cash management of all customer operations with us, you're a wholesale customer with us, you operate in five different countries with us, and you want a comprehensive statement. We can deliver that. You may be doing businesses with two other banks that are not ING, you might want us to include the data from the same banks in that same statement, we offer virtual cash management for that purpose, so that customers, that's what we care for, get the best possible statement of what they plan to do in banking. It's about the customer and then the ING. That's how we're focusing on our customers and innovating. To achieve innovation, you need to work on your culture. We've developed an innovation system. It's called PACE. We have boot camps and hackathons, they're wonderful terms for highly creative processes to make sure that all the ideas in the ING surface and become successful. If you want to do that, you also have to be very agile. I'm sure you've read about that too, because we introduced agile, for example, in the Netherlands. Whenever we innovate and want people to try something new, you have to allow mistakes. Within the bank, there are some environments where you're not allowed to make mistakes, but an innovating bank always has some environments where learning involves making mistakes, and you have to allow that. Now, our third column for success as an innovating bank is looking outside. Unfortunately, the bank does not yet have a monopoly on the best ideas in the world. There are perfectly good ideas surfacing outside the ING, so we call them fintechs. If you look at the world outside ING, there are clever people that can find solutions to improve services for our customers through very smart solutions and applications. We try to see whether we can partner up with them or purchase what they do to integrate that in our services. That's one important column in our strategy, innovating. Another important column in our strategy is sustainability. We have three main chapters in sustainability. The first is the sustainability surrounding concerning individual consumers. Increasingly, these consumers do their banking and money matters by phone. These consumers will then comprehend money still more abstractly because money is no longer a slip of paper. It's turned into a digital number. It's still more abstract. How do we ensure that consumers tomorrow do not lose track of the value of money? It's exceptionally important for economic growth. People need to understand the value of money, and they need to know how to budget and save for the future. Digital interaction, on the one hand, entails the risk of less understanding for the value of money, but you can also deploy other initiatives to enhance understanding. That's what we're trying to achieve. We measure that through people who feel financially empowered or people who feel financially included. We have targets for that. That's one sustainability chapter. The second sustainability chapter is our own business. How can we ensure that we reduce the ING CO2 footprint? Year after year, as you saw in our annual report last year, we continued to reduce our CO2 emissions. We're not there yet. We want to continue. There's more work to do. I've announced that toward 2020, we intend to procure all our electricity through renewable energy sources. That's not easy to arrange in all 40 countries where we operate, but we're going to make it happen. The third part of sustainability is that wherever we can help support our customers transition to sustainable and to bring about investments in sustainability and change their business model to a circular business model. As you'll see, our portfolio for corporate support towards sustainable transition, our portfolio is nearly EUR 35 billion, EUR 34.3 billion at the end of 2016. One example is financing for solar energy projects. Recently, we financed one in Japan, and that yields enough electricity for 4,500 households. I have a confession to make. In our pursuit of sustainability, sometimes things go awry, as you may have read about the Dakota Access Pipeline. We set ourselves very rigid standards and proclaimed a very rigid policy to ensure that if we do something with customers, we meet certain conditions, and that we comply with local legislation and regulations. In the Dakota Access Pipeline, we noticed that the interests of a certain tribe, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, that in weighing the interest in the decision, we didn't consider their interests sufficiently, and that bothered us. We went to talk to them to see what we could do to support their interests as much as possible, and we came up with a solution for that. All those sustainability activities matter to us, and we pay a lot of attention, and we get recognition for that, too. Sustainalytics ranked us at the top of 395 global listed banks. The Dow Jones Sustainability Index placed us at the top of global companies as well, and we received additional recognition too. It doesn't end here. We're going to carry on. Now, focusing on the customer, the elements of innovation and sustainability yields not only commercial growth in terms of new customers and new business, it also improves the financial results. In the past year, our net earnings equaled nearly EUR 5 billion, our underlying net earnings. We achieved a return on equity of 11.6% for the bank, which was a serious improvement with respect to the previous year. We also reinforced our capital buffers to 14.2% for the group, and because we're thriving, we can pay out dividend and even increase it a bit. Now, if you consider this list of financial targets that we set for ourselves, you'll note that over time, we keep improving, and in some cases, we have already achieved some of the targets that we set for 2020. Now, about shares. This is a dip you see that in 2016. That's known as a very turbulent year on the equity markets. At the start of the year, we saw a lot of confusion about where Europe was headed and confusion about whether or not there would be a Brexit about the U.S. elections. Investors want clear answers. They don't like confusion. At the same time, at the start of the year, one of our coworkers was thought possibly not to be meeting the coupon obligations. That increased the pressure on financial markets at the time. As the year progressed, we noticed that things were becoming clearer. We may or may not be happy about Brexit, the decision does provide a clear situation. The fact that there's a new president in the U.S. makes things clear and their expectations about economic growth. We saw that in the second half of the year, the market picked up. That's why the ING share was at EUR 8.6 and ended at EUR 13.5. Five volatile years. It was a very volatile year. As for the success that we achieve altogether, that's acknowledged not only by our customers or by awards that we receive. Another token of recognition comes from international publications. The Banker in 2016 proclaimed that ING was the best bank in the world and the best in Western Europe and in the Netherlands and Belgium. It's nice to hear that's an incentive for us to carry on. I'd like to start by thanking you for your support, for scrutinizing ING because that keeps us on our toes. I'd especially like to thank everybody who works here doing their best day after day for the customers, because that's what delivers results. That's my report. Thank you. Thank you, Ralph. Now I'd like to proceed to item 2C, which is a report of the Supervisory Board. The detailed version has been incorporated in the annual report, pages 70 to 76. If I may, I'd like to give you a brief overview. The Supervisory Board met 12 times in 2016. Important items on the agenda were, amongst others, the acceleration of the Think Forward strategy, which is exactly what Ralph Hamers was just talking about, the capital requirement. We obviously also had the NN Group and all these transactions that were involved with the divestment of the NN Group. We talked about sustainability, internal controls, risks, and mitigating measures. As well as developments in respect of supervision. The committees and Supervisory Board discussed a variety of subjects, such as the interest of ING customers, other stakeholders, quarterly results, corporate governance, risk management, human resources issues, the culture within ING and the costs related to regulation and supervision. Obviously, if you have questions, you may ask those questions later on. With that, I'd like to proceed to 2D, which is the last presentation before we proceed to Q&A, and that is the remuneration report for 2016. It's also incorporated in the annual report, pages 97 through 106, and we have a brief presentation by the Chairman of the Remuneration Committee, Henk Breukink, and he's sitting behind me. Henk, you have the floor. Thank you, Jeroen. Ladies and gentlemen. In view of the performance of ING in 2016, and the individual performance of the members of the Executive Board, it has been decided to grant variable remuneration to members of the Executive Board. The performance of the members of the Executive Board have been evaluated based on financial and non-financial performance criteria. In general, this performance was better than the targets that had been defined to that effect. This is shown in percentages of 19% of the CEO and 18% for the CFO and the CRO. The remuneration paid out in 2016 to the Executive Board and other posts have been included in the remuneration report for 2016, as Jeroen just pointed out. ING, this year again, took a closer look at its position regarding the benchmark. On that basis, and taking into account the interests of all stakeholders, it was decided to make sure that the total, the at-target remuneration of the CEO, as per the 1st of January 2017, be increased with 3%. That means that this remuneration is still below the median. This is a matter that we want to keep paying attention to. I'd like to close with that. Thank you. Now I should like to proceed to the Q&A session. We have about an hour for that. You can see this on the agenda. The idea is that we cluster two, three questions. We'll have to see who's going to answer those questions here at the table. That way the people here at the table have some time to reflect about the answers. Anyway, we'll try to wrap that all up within an hour. Please go ahead. Please take a position behind the microphones. Now, the most convenient thing in view of the light, that is that you move to two and five. Mr. Spanjer is at microphone three. I can hardly see microphone six, so please avoid that microphone. Allow me to start with microphone number two. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Steve Ezer, the Association of Legal Protection Investors. First of all, I would like to talk about the rules and anything regarding these rules. Club compliance is quite a nuisance. We would like to know how much this is costing ING on an annual basis. We have concerns about the weakening of the bank rules in connection with regulations. We would like to hear more about this from the ING executive board. The solvency ratio in excess of 100 is good, we think that it's increasing too much. We would like to know how much money you have in store that is not really making money because of these rules. Extremely low interest rates. How does that impact your business case? Basel IV, how is it affecting ING? The new rules for after 2020, MREL. A bank in difficulties will have to write off on bonds first, then there's EUR 137 million additional provisions. This has got to do with SMEs. Then there are customers with interest derivatives. Is this enough? Don't you fear that people who have fixed their mortgage rates might submit claims? Those are our questions, Mr. Chairman. These are seven questions. I suggest that we select three of those questions to answer. No. Let's proceed to the answers. These are the questions. The CEO, the CFO. I'd like to leave it to Ralph to decide who's going to answer. The cost of compliance, that'll be for the CRO, for Patrick. This is about the LCR. How's our LCR developing? Is this a missed opportunity? You're talking about deregulation. It's not something that is on our agenda in Europe. Regulation and increased regulation is on the agenda. Deregulation is something that is taking place the other side of the ocean. This is a topic there. It's being discussed there are no specific plans to that effect, it's very difficult to comment on that, to be quite honest. We would like to discuss it here as well, we're hearing these warning words from politicians I don't know what this warning is about. There's no deregulation. There's only further regulation. We've got to make sure that that doesn't lead to further increasing the capital requirements. There have been words of warning. Mr. Hamers. The interest rates and negative interest rates, we're adjusting our model to that. That's one of the reasons why we're taking a very specific look at primary relations, that's what we call them. These are relationships that do not deal with one single product, but these relations see us as the core bank, they might do more business with us. If the customer so wishes, that could lead to further operations with them. That's the reason why we choose to grow and to broaden these relationships. The low interest rates also leads to pressure on the cost, we will have to make sure that these costs are in control. This is something we've been able to show last year. We've been able to reduce our cost income ratio last year. That's how we deal with low interest rates. Basel IV. That's very difficult to answer that question. This is a debate that is taking place, in view of all these elections that are taking place in Europe, it's not entirely clear what's happening here, it's not clear what is happening in the U.S. The only thing that we assume is that the regulators, the regulatory authorities, and the European politicians have already indicated that they will not allow that the rules of Basel IV will lead to a more than significant increase of capital requirements. We believe that that means that they will make sure that should those new rules be implemented, that the rules will be such that they won't lead to a more than significant increase of our capital requirements. That's something we'll just have to trust for the moment. The provision SMEs, we're assuming that this is sufficient, otherwise we would have reported that. You were also talking about the Consumer Credit Directive. This has got to do with mortgage interest rates and the calculation of the interest in the case of early amortization. This directive was approved in July. Since July, we have been looking at how certain penalty interests have been calculated. The Autoriteit Financiële Markten has issued a guideline for such calculations, at this point, we're studying that. Compliance costs, Wilfred. Obviously, it depends a bit on what you mean when you refer to compliance costs. I'd like to distinguish three categories. One is all the levies, bank taxes, and all that is reflected in the annual report. Last year it was EUR 845 million approximately. As a company, obviously we incur operational costs to make sure that we comply with all these rules. The problem here is that, first of all, we've got the compliance department, and that's also part of risk management. What's more, we've got lots of people in the first line in the business, an important part of their duty, but it usually isn't their only duty, to make sure that we can comply with all these requirements. Of course, things become a bit more complicated. People do all sorts of things in order to determine what the costs are exactly. I can tell you that at the headquarters in compliance, we have a couple of hundred people working within my own risk domain. Then we have more or less the same number of people in the business unit. Then at the first line, we also have quite a number of people that are dealing with this subject. You can imagine that the EUR 840 million should be increased by about EUR 150 million. I can't really give you any certain terms, fixed terms in this respect. Up to communicating with you. I think you're asking about the liquidity rates or the LCR ratio, and you said 100%. In the context of whether that's costing us too much money. I think the first thing to say is we believe in strong liquidity. We always have. We are a client-focused bank. The money we lend to our customers primarily comes from our deposits. Strong liquidity is core to what we do. We don't regard the LCR ratio as a threat. I think the fact that there is a common regulatory liquidity ratio, which is new. We always had capital ratios, the market didn't have a common, at least in Europe, liquidity ratio. The fact that we do have one is good, and we're pleased that it's there. I think that's the most important point. It's not a threat to us. We're pleased that other people have to meet strong liquidity ratios. We always believed in it. In terms of measuring it, we have a treasury. We look at it in our ALCO every month. We try to make sure we have healthy buffers, which we do, and not get it too high. I don't regard that as a threat. Thank you, Patrick. Thank you, Mr. Stevens. I'm going to move to microphone number 4. Mr. Van den Bosch. Yes, my name is Van den Bosch. I'm from West Friesland. A beautiful area. Mr. Van der Veer, first of all, my compliments for your new meeting strategy to cluster a couple of questions instead of just firing away all the questions and your comment, 3.8 billion shares, you said that, in excess of 5, you have to round that off, so that would be 3.9 billion shares. If you're going to round off, you may get differences in inventories, like oil companies tend to have from time to time. I'm sure this is just a comment. We have to have a bit of a sense of humor here. I have another point, and this is for Mr. Hamers. Whether he did this presentation we just listened to entirely by heart. He was talking about the fact that administration or paperwork is not a hobby of his. I'm sure his wife does the paperwork then. There was one point that was lacking, and that was France in the presentation. Spain was mentioned on a couple of occasions, there was nothing about France. If I go to the Bank of France or you need a million seals and stamps and signatures before you can get money from the bank. I think that ING could really make some headway there. I thought it was great that Mr. Hamers mentioned the pipeline in the U.S. In West Friesland, we always say, "That's easy to say something looking back." Retrospectively, you know what went wrong. People don't really admit or tend to admit that they made mistakes. Anyhow, another point, 7,000 jobs may disappear up to 2021. I would like to know how many jobs will be lost in the Netherlands. Then we have the whole IFRS situation. What is it? About 10% or 14% that banks have to maintain in terms of reserves. Can this also be done in state bonds that you can easily sell? Those are my questions. One more brief comment about the whole situation with cars, electric cars. What about a bicycle? There is one member of the executive board that tends to take the bike. This person is very environmentally friendly. He's cutting back on the footprint. Thank you, Mr. Van den Bosch. Mr. Hamers. I must admit that I didn't really understand the second question, but I do understand the first question. The number of jobs, not that they're disappearing, because I talked about the number of jobs that may be impacted by our investment in digitization, and the content may change, or the jobs may disappear entirely, or these jobs may be relocated. I think it's about 2,900 jobs in the Netherlands, but this is a number I think I know by heart, but I'm not quite sure. I can give you the number in a moment. Second question, quite honestly, I have to say I didn't really understand it, so perhaps you could repeat your question. I have to check. We've been talking about numbers of shares. That was a comment. That was not a question. You were talking about the fact that you don't like paperwork. That was a comment. It wasn't a question, was it? I talked about France. That was also a comment. I've been talking about IFRS, that banks need to keep certain amounts of money as a buffer. I'm always saying, if you've got that money on the shelves, that would be dead money. Aren't you allowed to invest that in state bonds? Couldn't you just say, "Okay, we've got that money on the shelf. Why don't we invest it in state bonds?" Now on my list, I see one more point, and that's a really important one. I talked about it last year as well. Why don't you guess which one it was? Perhaps I can comment on the bicycle of Mr. Timmermans. No, I'm not going to mention any names. It's about something very important. You touched upon the subject in your presentation, the bank tax. How about the bank tax? The double bank tax. Right. Okay. Recapping. Dutch jobs impacted by restructuring process, 2,300, so 2,300, 800 of which are external colleagues. About France, I can talk about France until the cows come home, about all the countries, really. We've got 40 countries. We're not going to mention all 40 countries. If we look at all these different countries where we are challenger, so to speak, France is one of those countries. We're doing a really good job there, improving our service levels. Also, recruiting new customers. France is part of what we call the Model Bank. This is the way we want to standardize our service towards our customers in five countries, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, and the Czech Republic. That has to allow us to have the same level of service in all these countries. France has been included in this list, and we're growing there very rapidly. We have an extensive branch network where the large French customers like to do business with us. Regulatory costs or bank tax. You saw that our regulatory costs increased by more than EUR 200 million. A major part of this is the bank tax that we get in several countries, and the marginal tax that we pay in the Netherlands, for our Dutch fiscal profit is around 70%. This is our corporate tax, bank tax, and the fact that we cannot reclaim or settle VAT. This is an enormous effective tax rate for us in the Netherlands. There's another aspect, extraordinary aspect, that the Dutch bank tax is levied on all our operations and not only the Dutch operations. We're faced with a situation in which we have double taxes for our operations in Belgium, Poland, and a number of other countries, which is unacceptable. We've highlighted this in our discussions with the Ministry of Finance, and they are looking into the matter. I have one small additional question. You're talking about 70%, but I don't really get it. How come? How can Apple here in Holland pay about 15% and other companies, large multinationals also pay 15%? I really don't understand that. You're mentioning 70%, and these companies are paying a very low percentage. 20% of your percentage. I cannot comment on how other companies deal with their tax planning. We pay corporate taxes in the Netherlands plus bank taxes over and above that. We have another issue because we cannot settle VAT because we're exempt operations. I assume you're just paying your taxes due, but it's ridiculous that ING should pay 70%. PostNL also has to pay a high percentage of taxes, but other companies from abroad that operate here in the Netherlands, they only pay 15%. I hope the press is taking note of this. 70% for Dutch company and 15% for foreign companies. Mr. Van den Bosch, thank you very much. We can only reflect on our own position. Mr. Hamers made it very clear that 70% consists of a number of components. It's not one kind of tax. It's not just corporate tax, but it all adds up. I'd like to move to microphone three, Mr. Spanjaak. Mr. Van der Veer, sorry. Good afternoon on this first day of the week. I also have a couple of questions. Can I also make a few comments about things that appeared in the news? I hope that you'll allow me to ask those questions about what we read in the news. Somehow, the ATMs are being removed from the walls in a different way nowadays. Have you already received emails and letters from the property owners or your landlords increasing your rent or your premiums? You sent someone to the polls, and this person was interviewed, and this person was very impressed. This morning, I read a press release that there are four companies that don't agree with your funding policy. That doesn't add up for me. I would like to hear a bit more about that. These are questions about the news. About the agenda. Mr. Chairman, this is shocking, this agenda. Did we not have a member of the board years ago who had 26 supervisory directorships? I hope you're not organizing a board with people who have all sorts of directorships. Mr. Van der Steen had lots of directorships, and now we have two other nominees. I'm not that happy with that. They're green. Why are we moving from orange to green? I don't really get that. Then I'd like to know what your position is in this respect. Then, of course, questions about the annual report. That was very difficult to obtain, but this is an aside. Finally, I succeeded in getting hold of a report at your head office. The keynote, I thought that was rather shocking. Quite a disappointment. I wanted to ask you about this, page three, the financial goals. If we look at that, we see that your leverage ratio for the ING Groep. You say that in 2020, it's supposed to be lower than 4%. That's nice for a target, but in 2016, it amounted to 4.8, and it became worse than in 2015. In 2015, it was 4.4. I do have questions. I mean, this is a worsening of 4.4 percentage points. How do you want to move from 4.8 in 2016 to 4.0 in 2018? The 0.8%, how are you going to do that in a couple of months? Mr. Spanjer, we understand your question. Please go on. Mr. Spanjer. Page five. There's even more specific information. You say that you're only in 17 countries. In 17 countries, you rolled out an app, whereas you have operations in many more countries. How about the other 40 countries? When would it be their turn? Second column. In 2016, will we only be given a EUR 0.01 more in dividend? That's not a lot. I just heard that the bonuses amount to a couple of percentage points. EUR 0.01 increase as compared to 2015 is not a lot of money. Although you do make a big song and dance about this. How about the claim from these Cuban brothers, Alfredo Villoldo and Gustavo Villoldo, the $2-point-something billion in the U.S.? What is the situation there? I suggest that you leave it at that. I think that's a splendid idea. These are seven questions. That way, here at the table, they can start reflecting on the answers. In the meantime, I'll just move to microphone two, Mr. Vreeke. I'm Robert Vreeke of WeConnectYou, Public Affairs and Investment Relations. Good afternoon. It's been another excellent year. ING became Global Bank of the Year. The share price of the ING thrived with respect to the stock market, and ING is the most sustainable bank of the year. That's magnificent. You would expect it to be a triple-A. I think that this needs to be communicated better. The question is, can it be communicated better? Because half of the Netherlands still thinks that Triodos and ASN Bank are the most sustainable banks in the Netherlands. They are not. That's not explained very clearly. That's my first question. In terms of sustainability, ING is at the vanguard in supporting small innovations. Last year, they said that the Upflow shower was the thriftiest shower in the world. That was a wonderful innovation, the ING was the first to order heated pillows. Now, in the ArenA stadium, in the off tribune of the ING, there are a lot of preheated chairs. It's a wonderful result because you save 95% in energy. Heating seats costs less than EUR 0.01 an hour. Go compare that with regular heating systems. It's magnificent. By now, Prime Minister Rutte and Minister Kamp are on board with this as well. They're delighted. I went to the Orange trade mission of the ING and KLM. That was a wonderful event. The seats were preheated. Everybody loved it, the turnout was too low. In that huge area, you can fit an additional 2,000 people that the ING is in a much better position to communicate sustainability and entrepreneurship. I heard mention of a bank, Amsterdam has the Urbee electric share bike, which costs EUR 1 an hour, EUR 5 a day for employees. It's right in front of your doorstep, it's not only at the WTC, World Trade Center, but it's also available at the ING. Next, employment. That's an important question. This Randstad CEO has said four years in a row, "We need to bring 80,000 ITers and technicians from abroad." I say train those people in the Netherlands if the ING can help you because the ING needs a lot of IT people and a lot of technical experts. Couldn't the ING help those people get technical training in secondary school? That would be wonderful. About remuneration. I'm delighted that we have Mr. Balkenende among us because considering these excellent results, Mr. Hamers receives about 10 times the Balkenende standard, there's another executive here who receives 100 times the Balkenende standard. If I'm considering these excellent results, I think we should be able to solve that problem too. The question is, what can you do about this? Can you ensure that his remuneration complies with the market standards here and in the Netherlands? Mr. Hamers is very modest and won't say this out in the open, it's your challenge to retain this fine gentleman in this group. Those are my questions. I'll start by passing the questions to Ralph, your last one about whether his salary will be adjusted, when Mr. Hamers and probably the CFO are done with that one, I'll ask Mr. Broekink to cover that one. Okay, Mr. Spanjer's question about the ATMs. Yes, we're concerned about that trend as well. We're trying to see what the best solution for the future would be. Either those ATMs need to be protected better or the surrounding neighborhood shouldn't experience so much nuisance. It concerns us, we're trying to resolve it together with other banks. Next point, when we're talking about the visit to the pole. We're trying to get our customers interested in sustainability that way. We visited that together with many customers from our property company to ensure additional investments to make the Netherlands more sustainable. As for your question about the leverage ratio, you saw an arrow, that arrow means that it should be higher than 4%, the leverage ratio is 4.8%, it does exceed 4%. We're there, we don't need to reduce that. As for the 17 countries receiving standardized services, that's about the wholesale end of the bank. We've been trying to standardize those systems between different banks, and we've accomplished that in 17 countries. In the end, we hope to accomplish this in 40 countries, and we continue to pursue that goal. As for the dividend, as for the total shareholder return, as our share price keeps rising and the dividend does as well, we're still very attractive, and our dividend policy is intended to be progressively applied over time. We deviate from what some of our counterparts do in terms of payout ratio. After extensive deliberation with many shareholders, we have selected our present option, and that may be one reason why the share price is rising. Next. We mentioned that claim from the Cuban brothers. That's been taken care of. The case was deemed inadmissible. Isn't that the explanation, Jan Willem? It appeared before the New York District Court in April 2015, and the decision was in our favor. We won at that district court, and then they appealed in 2016, and the appellate court issued a ruling in our favor as well, and they could request a review, but they didn't. That has made it final and irreversible. Their claim has definitively been rejected. The performance of the ING. Yes, Mr. Vreeke. We're doing well in a lot of areas. Thank you for mentioning that. We also communicate our success. We continue working hard and focusing on our customers and on sustainability. We get enough recognition and acknowledgment for our success, but we don't think that we need to market that very aggressively. As for the IT people, that's a good point. The ING and many other companies are increasingly digital, so the demand for IT people and people working in technology is rising for us and throughout the Netherlands. Luckily, we operate in a great many other countries where we can also recruit people. We recruit them in the Netherlands, where we train them in part ourselves and in other countries because we're transnational and operate with virtual teams. Part of Dutch banking is covered in other countries as well. That ensures our access to top talent, and I'm delighted that we were recently designated as the employer of choice in the Netherlands, and that should enhance our appeal for IT people as well. We should have an easier time getting new employees. We have a very agile culture in IT. We're very flexible, and we're a very international company. We have no complaints about recruitment, and we continue to train them and develop them. As for remuneration, Henk, would you please take that last question? Thank you. Everybody here is aware that in the decisions about remuneration, especially those of the executive board, as supervisory board members, it's not only a formal duty to involve all stakeholders. On our own behalf, we intend to do that and have done that. This means that we question several things. We look at the numerical aspect of remuneration, your remark should be highlighted that numerically alone, you're right. Even in the unusual circumstances of the previous year, it would feel right to make a change. The first question is it right? The second question, is this proper? We explicitly ask the second question and said, given the special circumstance of the previous year with all those painful restructurings, Mr. Hamers mentioned that in his own speech and said he didn't think that was the right time for a quantum leap in remuneration. I have two remarks to add to clear up any potential misunderstandings. First, if we're going to talk about this again, we need to keep in mind that it's not the remuneration of the ING Netherlands head, but it's the CEO of a company operating in 40 countries. I think that might be of interest to some of the people taking notes here. The second thing I'd like to emphasize, as I did yesterday, is that the policy is certainly not to drive remuneration upward. Our policy targets remuneration below the median, which, as you know, concerns Euro Stoxx companies, not only financial institutions, to remain below the median to avert any leapfrog effect. Thank you. Now, microphone four. Thanks. My name is Kuba Gogolewski, I represent a broad coalition of Polish and lignite communities. I came here to give testimony on the impacts of ING Finance companies who are still building and planning new mines, both in Poland and in Turkey. I was allowed by Turkish colleague presented, too. It's great to hear that ING plans to have renewable forest energy for its buildings operation in 2020. I hope it will be known broadly also in the more, let's say, climatically problematic countries. There's still loopholes in your coal policy, I would like to point to them. I'll need five minutes. I'll ask three questions at the very end. I'll promise to be brief. Current ING policy excludes project financing for coal in mines, that, at this time, was a really progressive step forward. It also excludes extremely undiversified coal companies. In spite of this commitment, billions of EUR are still available to state-owned utilities in Poland, such as PGE and Enea SA. We know that Poland is not especially a climate leader in Europe, which, in line with the Polish government vision to deepen even the dependence on coal, leads to three gigawatts, so 3,000 megawatts of coal currently under construction, coal power plants, new mines and new power plant being built. I'm giving these details because they'll be important for later. I will focus on the largest utility, PGE. If 90% of its generation is derived from coal. It's clearly a company that's not especially going towards a transition. It's building two power plants as we speak, about two gigawatts, planning two new lignite open-pit mines with two billion lignite tons lying in there. It operates Europe's largest power plant, Bełchatów, which emits 35 million tons, and it also uses extreme amounts of water. Despite the public opposition in Poland, Germany, and Czech Republic, there is also another mine planned on the border between Czech, Germany, and Poland, and there is international problems with these mines. What is more, people are not aware that Poland is really low on water resources. It is the fourth country with lowest water resources per capita in Europe, lower than Holland, and 70% of all water used in Poland is for coal power plant cooling and for drainage of mines. We have 30% left for all other uses, agriculture, tourism, et cetera. This is coal. This leads to PGE generation and drainage of mines leading to the disappearance of the size of the biggest mine, sorry, biggest lake in Poland every three years. Just to capture an idea, lake disappearing every three years. In September 2015, ING, together with other banks, signed a PLN 5.5 billion, which is about EUR 103 billion syndicated loan, and there is an open revolving credit facility still available for the company. It has three open bonding agreement programs from 2009, from 2011, and from 2014, which allows still the company, even today, after so many times, to attract billions of EUR if it wants to issue bonds. This is all legacy I want to point to. It is also signed in 2014, a bond agreement with a subsidiary of PG in Sweden. It is a company, doesn't have any coal, but it is a pure finance subsidiary. It is an issue how do you address these things. Now the questions, maybe because the context has been given. Given that PGE has been blacklisted already by Norway's sovereign wealth fund, other financial institutions know about the problematics with this company, I want to encourage ING to go even further. The question is, when is ING planning to stop transactions with old clients, not only new clients, who are reliant in over 50% on electricity production or turnover from coal? Are you able to set strict dates saying when you stop engaging and phasing out? That would be really helpful. The second is, when is ING planning to lower the threshold for turnover of new clients from 50 to 30? In 2015, 50 was really good. A lot of your competitors have moved ahead. The last question, when is ING planning to stop providing any form of financing? Broadly syndicated loans underwriting to any companies planning new coal capacity, new coal mines, new power plants. We know from Paris Agreement, from your Paris pledge, there is no place for this. There are three questions. You are operating in Poland. I know it is a difficult market, also in Turkey, you have been in six years providing financing to the state-owned company, developing 10 gigawatts of new lignite capacity. They are very difficult markets. We expect really orange to be the new green, not the new black. Thank you. Yeah. We understand your question. I think it's quite specific. Shall we do it? We don't go to the next question. We answer you first. Yeah. Okay. Our portfolio approach is that we decrease the commitment to coal. That's what we're doing. In some cases, we have actually entered into a commitment to these companies before we change our policy. I'm sure you appreciate that in weighing the balances of all stakeholders that on one side, we try to come to policies that generate a discussion with our clients in order to decrease the carbon footprint on one side, that when we have made commitments before a change of policy, that we also honor a commitment like that because it's a client. It's a legal agreement that you have signed. The way we treat our clients is that if we have pre-agreed to do something, that we honor that agreement. That we look at the future as to how we can motivate a client like that, and how can we engage a client to think along in order to decrease the carbon footprint. That's what we do with these coal-related clients as well. Therefore, we did initiate a policy with a threshold of 50%. We'll see how that develops and how we will further decrease to 30%. I'm not going to give you a commitment on that at this moment in time. The policy is always in development. What I do want to stress, though, is that, from the total portfolio that we have in power generation, the EUR 9 billion power generation portfolio, that the 39% of that portfolio is already green. We are making headways, and we are truly improving on it. We rather do this in engagement with our clients than exclusion of clients, because then we can't influence. I don't think your competitor at Commerzbank. Just one sentence. In August 2015, they introduced when they end engagement. They said, we still engage. There is a criteria. When a company doesn't meet by 2021, we stop engaging. I think what we are trying to say is engagement if the company is not responding, and there are companies certainly that won't be responding because the world is varied, will need an incentive to finalize. The question is, are you able to say this year or next year, we'll think of ending dates for engagement for the most problematic clients who don't want to respond? Yeah, I'm not going to commit on it. These are things that we do, as we see a trend, as we can convince clients, and that's how we work. If it comes to our direct footprint in Poland, it is 100% renewable already. That's our direct footprint. Thank you. Thank you very much. If you have additional questions, I suggest you take them after the meeting. On to microphone 2. Microphone 2. After microphone 2, we'll hear from the lady at microphone 5. Let's do that. In the order that I have indicated. I'm going to stick with the sequence I just mentioned. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm Femir. I work for PGGM Investments, and I'm speaking on behalf of my customers, including the Pension Fund for Health and Wellbeing. I'm also authorized to speak at this meeting on behalf of Menzis and the Goudse Verzekeringen. Mr. Chairman, I have only three questions. Let me start by stating my appreciation for the results you've achieved during the year under review and the way you announced this in the integrated annual report. You made additional improvements and established a very clear link between your strategy and the financial highlights that you presented, as well as your sustainability targets. We encourage that integrated annual report, and we appreciate taking note of it. The annual report also very clearly describes how you combine your strategy with your efforts to add value. Ralph Hamers just mentioned that it was captured in a single slide, so that really benefits us. I'd like to start with your sustainable development goals. You indicated that you support them, two more specifically. Generally, you mentioned that. That is also made very explicit in the value creation model in your annual report. Our question on that subject is whether the ING will be quantifying the impact in that field and how do you envisage continuing to report in your integrated annual report about that impact? The second topic I'd like to touch on is that you indicate that you're closely involved in the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. That's quite a mouthful and means that transparency will improve in financial reporting About climate change. Can you indicate how you apply this in daily practice and what you'll be doing this in the near future, and how it helps you assess customers and your own financing practices? Quite a few questions were asked about financing coal exploitation operations, especially refinancing. I'm going to omit those for now. Although Ralph Hamers, in his presentation, mentioned the Dakota Access Pipeline, stating explicitly that those are lessons learned. Can you tell me what those mean and how it will affect procedures such as due diligence prior to projects, and what lessons you learned from that? Those were my three questions. Perhaps I'd like to wrap up with a point of order. Perhaps you might want to return to the old question of asking questions where people raise their hand and you designate them, and that will help us take better notes about the answers to other questions. Thank you very much. I promised that I would give the lady at microphone 5 the floor. I'm sorry that you had to wait so long. Please go ahead. Thank you. I'm Vicky van Eck from the Association of Investors for Sustainable Development, abbreviated VBDO. Dear executive and supervisory boards. First, I would like to second the compliments of my counterpart for your score on DJSI and the CDP, as well as for publishing an integrated report and your decision to take action on the Dakota Pipeline. We appreciate that. We still think you can make a lot of progress in your customer portfolio concerning climate issues, because it's unclear how you're going to meet the Paris Climate Agreement and the VBDO sees this as a strategic risk facing ING. Your bank finances fossil energy and does not measure the emissions by customers in your investments and has not set specific objectives for reducing the CO2 emissions on the part of your clients. There were some complaints from the environmental organizations in the newspaper this morning. I see that the response from the ING is that you don't have standards for quantifying this yet. Listed companies do have access to internationally recognized methods for that, and there's also the PCAF initiative for measuring total impact on climate. I have three questions. The first is, over what term will the ING be reporting indirect emissions from your customer portfolio? The second is, what actions will the ING take concerning the customer portfolio to meet the Paris Climate Agreement? That requires a reduction of current CO2 emissions by 40%. Third, does the ING intend to set ambitious, quantifiable targets annually to reduce indirect quantifiable emissions? Thank you, Mr. Hamers. Thank you. As for the sustainable development goals, we are involved via our customers in many different ways in all sustainable development goals. There are two that we focus on specifically. Those are sustainable development goals 8 and 12. In terms of 8, financial empowerment and financial inclusion, we certainly have very specific targets. These include reaching out to 25 million people who feel financially empowered. That's one point. I'm going to combine my answers to questions from both speakers. Second, about the Dakota Access Pipeline. If you consider what happened there and how we deal with that. We always try to investigate the details of compliance with all legislation and regulations, and we commission consultants for that, too. Ultimately, we didn't do everything right. We need to improve screening and due diligence for these projects to ensure that all interested parties were involved and that their interests did receive consideration in granting permits and licenses. We'll need to be even more discerning in our questioning in this case. That's the lesson learned. Onto the next part. How do we deal with fossil fuels? First, we have our own carbon footprint. We do have very rigid reduction targets there. That's one. That's the direct ING footprint. The indirect footprint is that I'm sure quite a few efforts are made to improve, but ultimately to make them quantifiable. We have nearly 36 million customers in 40 countries. Of course, there are some listed companies, such as the ING, that disclose their footprint, but not all 35 million customers that we're dealing with do that. That's going to be quite a job to make that come about, because we have to continue working on a good standard that everybody understands and applies globally. We'll also have to agree on how we're going to report on this globally, that it's not reported by country in different ways, because that would merely cause a lot of red tape. We're waiting and we're biding our time for that, too. It needs to be feasible. Finally, how do you attribute a customer's footprint to a loan in euros from us? Because customers do business with a lot of different banks. Should we attribute that to the loan or the fact that this generates payment transactions? Or if it's a one-euro loan, do we have to take that on board for 100%? There's so many questions that remain to be answered. That's why we endeavor as part of the Financial Stability Board to bring about these standards and devise them for throughout the financial sector. This may not satisfy you, and we're not satisfied either because we're continuing the effort daily, but we're at the vanguard, and we continue to address this. It matters to us. As for your last question, can we set a date? No, we cannot commit to a date. This is the world. It's an important, big issue from the moment that all of us agree how we measure and how we attribute and how we report and how we can engage in the discussion. Once we understand that, we can see how we enhance our influence and motivate our customers to reduce their footprint. We do that based on the idea of motivate them and engage them rather than based on the idea of excluding them. Well, we've been at this for about a year. Those of you who are now waiting at the microphone will all have a turn, and I'd like to ask the others to ask your questions later on, but I am having trouble seeing the forest for all the trees. Number 1 and number 2, who was there first? Okay, can you accept that? Go ahead. Were you on the- Parice is my name. I'm an individual shareholder from Amsterdam South. Thank you, Mr. Hamers, for your very interesting presentation. I have 2 comments and 2 questions. First comment is, in the past, I attended ABN AMRO AGMs. I heard Mr. Calv say whether the interest rate is high or low, our margin remains intact. I've only heard you speak about a source of funding in the deposits, but I didn't hear you speak about the ECB. The 2nd question is, perhaps I didn't pay attention, but I hardly heard you speak about England and how important this market is for ING, and what your view is on the developments there, even post-Brexit. I have another question about the annual report. Page 29, the cash flow statement. Operational cash flow dropped slightly. These things happen. What about trading assets? This item. What is trading assets? In 2014, this is in millions of euros, it was -EUR 23 billion, the cash outflow of EUR 23 billion. In 2016, it's a cash inflow +EUR 16 billion. These are major differences. What does this mean? What does it stand for? I'm just checking whether they understand this question because page 29 says something entirely different. Page 29. I'm looking at page 29. Sorry, what did you say? I'm looking at page 29. I think you're making a mistake. Doesn't matter. We're going to give you the answer regardless. Okay. Microphone 2, then perhaps we can combine the answers. Good afternoon. My name is Kaina, the VEB. I'm speaking on behalf of the VEB, a number of individual investors that have given a proxy for one and a quarter million shares. The questions I have relate to the question how ING is going to make more money in the future. Question number one has got to do with the risk profile and the risk factors that you refer to. You refer to the risk for ING's capacity to make money at times in which interest rates are low and may become lower. At the same time, you refer to the risk of making money if the interest rates increase. The risks of making money becoming a challenge in case of deflation, but also inflation. I'm sure you know what my question is going to be. How do these comments help us? Does that mean that the matter is so complex that it's very difficult for you to determine how you're going to make money, in which way? Is it that you're trying to say that ING wants everything to be as stable as possible, and that if there are going to be changes, that they be tiny baby step changes. Question two, quite apart from the risk of how you're going to make money, you use the word digitization. You mention it very often, and I agree with that, however difficult that may be. I'm wondering whether you are addressing the difficult side aggressively enough. I'm truly wondering how a company as ING wants to maintain all these branch offices. I asked the same question a couple of years ago. I think ING could be more aggressive even by saying we believe in the digital bank that we are implementing and rolling out right now and perhaps painful measures should be brought forward. What is the use of branch offices, particularly if you're talking about hundreds of branch offices in different countries, also including the Netherlands. I think this is the method to improve your cost-income ratio and move it towards your target. Question number three. You're rather cryptical about this Return on Equity. You say that you're not going to disclose any targets because you want to wait and see what the authorities are going to say, the Dutch National Bank or the European Central Bank. The question that I then ask myself, how come you do not dare to communicate your ambitions to your shareholders? Why are you hiding behind the authorities? Is it that you have a very clever idea, namely, if you are too clear in terms of the returns you want to achieve, that the central banks will say, "We don't want that anymore. We don't want the banks to achieve all these returns and that the shareholders achieve all these returns," because they want to avoid any risk to be borne by society. The question is, why are you hiding behind the authorities? Last question has to do with remuneration. Don't worry, it's got nothing to do with directors' remuneration. They're very reticent in view of the size of ING and the complexity of ING. Companies, and you read this very often in the newspaper, are being assessed on the basis of how much people at the top make and how much people at the bottom of the organization is making. My question really isn't whether the ratio is okay, the remuneration at the top and the average employee. The question I ask myself is: how does the remuneration of the average employee relate to an employee in a different sector with comparable flexibility, comparable training, et cetera? Could it well be that an ING employee is paid much more than comparable employees in other sectors? For the order of the meeting, we're going to provide you two with answers. I had closed the session for new questions, so the people who were standing at microphone five and four, they'll be given the floor later on. Please be prepared to be concise with your questions. We've been debating this for more than an hour, and I don't want any other people asking questions. That means that you'll have to ask questions on any other business. Yes, this gentleman. Three questions. Says Mr. Hamers. Mr. Calv, an excellent banker. We always try to manage our margin whatever the interest rate may be. I think that we're dealing with extraordinary circumstances and negative interest rates, which is a big difference from what we were dealing with in the past. The question is: how do you manage your margin in your business if you're dealing with negative interest rates? Negative interest rates, which on the one hand, can lead to benefits if you were to be able to borrow your money from the ECB. We are a customer-oriented bank, and we're not a bank that is fully dependent upon the capital markets. Those are the banks where the crisis started. Those banks really are benefiting from the fact that they can easily get their hands on money. We're taking part in this in part, we particularly benefit from the money deposited by our customers. You cannot start talking about negative interest rates. You've got to be very careful with your relationship, and you want to make sure that you can pay out some interest in a negative environment that could lead to pressure on your margins. This is something that we can still manage quite well, and we expect to be able to continue to manage it quite well. If these conditions go on for very long, you'll see that the overall margin may be impacted. For now, it's okay. Second point, the U.K. and Brexit. We do have operations there. We are there particularly to support our English customers. We're also there with financial markets operations and the operations that we have there for global clients and financial markets operations are being done from our branch. It's a Dutch legal entity. We don't know exactly how we are going to passport these things in the future. These operations, even though we would do them outside the EU in the future, would those operations still lead to access to the EU? We believe that that should be the case as long as the branch is part and parcel of a Dutch legal entity. Should this change, we'll have to take a close look at the situation, we will be keeping a keen eye on this. This as far as our operations in the U.K. are concerned. Key assets in our bank, where we have some assets, some loans, some business that we do with customers, we reflect on that side of the balance sheet, and we have an ordinary accounting system. I give you a loan of EUR 100. As long as you comply with your payment obligations, that'll be the situation. There's also a different way of valuing these matters. That is to check in the market whether the loan to you in the market is still worth EUR 100, should I put it in the market? That is the fair value of the loan. Trading assets are valued in a different way, not in the ordinary accounting way, the way of keeping a loan on a balance sheet. We have to check and see whether the asset could also be sold. Then you'll have to increase or decrease the value according to fair value, and that'll lead to this trading assets. Trading assets is something you can trade in. Other questions about the risk profile. As a bank, the only thing you do is managing risk. All scenarios imply risks. Obviously, in our sector, we always have a Chief Risk Officer to look at all the scenarios and to flag all the risks. That's one thing. Second thing is, the question is, in which measure we as an executive board, but also the board of the bank, can properly manage these risks in order to make sure that we continue to be a healthy company during all these years, and that we adjust the company to the risks that we flag. Sometimes you have to improve certain things, sometimes you have to discontinue things, sometimes you have to make other strategic decisions. On the whole, our business model is quite feasible, particularly because in the last three and a half years, we've focused much more on this primary relationship with the customer instead of just the savings product or the mortgage product. We want to have a broader relationship with the customer. We want to really be a constant factor because that is good for your business model. That will also lead to the fact that the customer will do more business with you, and that will also lead to commission income, which is also a good thing in a situation of low, if not negative interest rates. Therefore, we believe that our business model has a future. If you add to that digitization, you see that we have a scalable model and that we can pursue our growth. All in all, this makes sure that we're doing the right things. In ING, we actually have two kinds of banks. We have banks that are direct banks, fully digitized banks, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, for instance. We see that this model, the digital model, can also be transformed into a total banking model. That wouldn't only involve the savings bank, the mortgage bank. No, it's a bank in which the customer deals with in a digital way and does many more things with. This is a future for the banks, for which we still have branches. You just said, should you not start rolling up your sleeves and do something about the number of branches? However, we believe that one has to keep in mind what the customer expects from you. You've also take the customer along in this digitization process. In the future, customer will be banking with us in a digital way and will not be visiting the branches very often. Still, we will always have customers that want to talk to us. That can be by phone, by Skype, and it can also be at a branch office. Some customers just enjoy coming to the branch office and talking to us. As people who have SMEs, they want to talk to their banker from time to time. Consumers who want to enter into a mortgage, they want to talk to someone because entering into a mortgage is by far the most important decision in the lives of our retail customers. There will always be branches. We can talk endlessly about how quickly you need to phase out your branch channel or your branches. In Belgium, we see this movement, the integration of the Record Bank into the ING system. In that process, we'll be reducing the number of branches from 1,200 to 600. That's rather speedy. Well, the thing is that in the Netherlands, you keep seeing one or two customers in these enormous branch offices. I'm just thinking you have too many branches. I may be mistaken. My first question was a different question. It wasn't whether your risk management is appropriate, but it strikes me, being someone who doesn't work in the banking sector, that you're saying that it's difficult for us when it's cold and when it's hot. We would expect more clarity. For you, inflation and deflation is an issue. High interest rates and low interest rates are an issue for you. The interest business of the bank is benefited by what we call a steep yield curve. It doesn't matter how high the interest rates are, but the question is how the interest rate develops over time. In a bank's transformation from short-term money to long-term mortgage money, you can't take all that time to transform, but somewhere you can work with a steeper yield curve. We all know that this yield curve is almost flat at this point in time, particularly at the end of the yield curve for mortgages, it may be somewhat higher, but from three to five years, it's rather a flat yield curve. For a bank, and part of the state bonds from three to five years yield flat returns is very, very difficult. It's quite challenging for a bank. Return on equity now. Are we playing a game with our regulatory authorities? Why don't we disclose this? No, we're not playing games. When we introduced our strategy in 2014, we set out an ambition of a return on equity of 10%-13% for the then capital rules that were applied at that point in time, and these rules still apply. You can consider that to be our ambition, 10%-13%. At bank level, we're performing at 11%. We also know that things are being changed in terms of those capital rules. If those capital obligations should increase enormously, we will not be able to comply with our commitment to our customers. We want to be very cautious. There's still a debate about Basel. We want to be very cautious and don't want to disclose an ambition. We first want to wait and see what the outcome is of the Basel IV debates and discussions. I do have one final question. Oh, yes, remuneration. How do you compare ING to the CCC? The ratio between employees in the financial sector, their remuneration in other sectors. Over the past six, seven years, in most countries, we've been extremely modest in terms of the development of our remuneration. We expect, whether you work in the financial sector or in other sectors, that the remuneration should be more or less similar. Should anybody feel that it's much more interesting to work in the financial sector, well, I think at an average employee level, in the course of the years, these levels have become similar. Profile of employees has also changed enormously. Everybody knows that we are looking for people who have technological backgrounds, technological training, and there's a lot of competition there. This competition doesn't only play a part in the financial sector, but also in other sectors. I'm sure that the pay is similar. There's a lot of competition for hiring people with a technical background. In terms of the order of the meeting, I'm going to move to microphone five, then four, and then the two other people who are standing at microphone five. I request you to formulate your questions very concisely. Thank you. Ms. Chief Executive Officer. My name is Diana Maciąga, and I am a representative of a Polish NGO called Workshop for All Beings, which works for wildlife and climate protection. ING was among the first banks to commit to take action for climate protection. However, its policy only applies to new clients, as ING will honor outstanding commitments. This includes several ING's investments in Polish coal companies, which activities contradict the Paris Agreement. Despite the fact that Poland is one of the EU's most polluted countries and several companies are still developing coal projects, among them is Enea. To cut a long story short, it is the second-largest Polish electrical utility. In 2016, it generated over 96% of electricity from coal combustion. It purchased ING Polish assets of 1.6 gigawatts. It has an investment strategy which further leads to increasing its coal capacity by 2025. For example, it is now finalizing by building a new 1,075 megawatt hard coal unit and is planning to build another 1,000 megawatt capacity coal-fired power plant, which would burn approximately 3 million tons of coal annually. This power plant, Ostrołęka C, would adversely impact water resources, human health, and of course, climate. What is more, it would further increase- Sorry, we had already a question about coals. Could you round off and come to your question? Honestly, my questions are fairly similar to what one of the persons speaking here already said, but in hope that ING strives for genuine climate protection, I would ask them nonetheless. Even when ING is going to end financing, which includes bond underwriting and share issues, as well as corporate finance of all companies generating over 30% of their income from coal, or whose percentage of installed coal capacity exceeds 50%. If and when is ING going to end financing of all companies who are building or planning new coal-fired power plants or mines, together with all of their subsidiaries in all countries? If and when is ING going to announce a concrete date by which ING will have ended existing commitments to all clients who fall under the above criteria? Thank you very much. Thank you. Microphone number four. Microphone number four. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Tiff from Amsterdam. I have a couple of questions. First question is, what is the definition or what are the criteria, rather, to qualify as a primary customer? Is that when you take two, three, or four products from ING? I would like to know a bit more about that. What is the average for primary relations? What is the average number of products that they have now? Other question is, do the bank employees have a bonus for increasing number of products per customer? What I'm fearing is that we are moving to a situation as in the U.S., such as Wells Fargo. "Eight is great" is their slogan. Bank employees take products for customers that they don't even want. Then another question, annual report transfer from Westland, Utrecht Hypotheek to the NN Group. I'm wondering when the obligations between ING and the NN Group will be severed. Since, yeah. Shall I ask first, and then you'll answer these other two? We're just going to round off this round of questions, and then we'll be giving all the answers in one go, and I'll close this item of the agenda. Questions. Dear Executive Officer, dear Managing Board members, dear shareholders. Could you say your name and your affiliation? We need that for the minutes. Jonathan Scholz, I stand here on behalf of BankTrack. The continued engagement with the fossil fuel industry for most of the coal sector, but also gas and crude oil, contradicts the world community's aspiration to limit global warming to two degrees maximum. Investing in fossil fuels does not only trigger potential complaints and fines, but is likely to lead to the smaller returns once governmental subsidies are cut back. ING was among the first banks to commit to stop the direct financing of new coal power plants worldwide, which is consistent with the concrete implementation of the Paris Agreement. This is a good first step, but it is insufficient to fully reflect the need to stop building any new coal plants around the world. Many of these plants are indeed not financed directly through project finance, but indirectly through general corporate finance for companies that are then indirectly using part of this financing to build new coal plants. On this front, the current criteria, excluding only new clients with more than 50% of their core business in coal power, only excludes a tiny portion of such companies planning new coal expansion, and it is highly insufficient. To pick one specific iconic example, the Philippines, which are directly impacted by climate change and where tens of new coal plants are being planned. From 2014 to 2016, ING has lent or issued bonds to the tune of $289 million to AES Corporation, KEPCO, and San Miguel Corporation, three companies all planning some coal expansion in the country. To be consistent with its commitment to stop financing new coal plants worldwide, as formulated in the ESR framework, ING has to stop financing companies engaged in coal energy through corporate loans. The climate does not differentiate between coal plants financed by project finance or by corporate loan. Question one, when will ING commit to also stop financing new coal plants indirectly by excluding all coal power companies planning to build new coal plants? As stated in the ESR framework, ING will exclude companies or organizations where the majority of activities relate to activities that ING excludes. Question two, does this mean ING excludes only the company part active in the excluded activity, or does this mean that any affiliate, subsidiary, parent company, or the entire group is excluded as well? ING and other European banks have so far disbursed over EUR 300 million in financing to the Punta Catalina coal plant project in Dominican Republic. One of the Punta Catalina construction companies, Odebrecht, pleaded guilty in a U.S. court last year, paying bribes to secure many lucrative construction contracts in Dominican Republic over many years. ING is a participant to the United Nations Global Compact, which requires business to work against corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery. Question three, how satisfied is ING that with its ongoing support for Punta Catalina, it is not, in fact, encouraging corrupt practices in the Dominican Republic? ING has signed the Equator Principles to mitigate social and environmental risks through its activities. It has learned the right lessons from the disastrous project of the Dakota Access Pipeline and sold its loans, a necessary step many NGOs have welcomed. In March 2017, BankTrack has, in cooperation with Greenpeace, released a briefing demonstrating that the Indonesian coal power plant, Cirebon II, in which ING was financially interested, violates the central principles number 2, 3, and 4. The critics have been confirmed by an Indonesian court. In its decision, the judge has revoked the environmental permit. Continuation of the project would hence be illegal. Given this judicial decision, ING is bound to make some changes in its financing as the plant does, in this case, not comply with host country law and has to ensure that the Equator Principles are employed properly or has to step back from financing Cirebon. Question 4 is, which strategy is ING pursuing? Is this your last question or It is my last question. Yeah. In case of the former, which steps has ING undertaken or will undertake to address violations of the Equator Principles? In case of the latter, when will ING announce its withdrawal? More questions. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. Yes. Madam, you're the last. Microphone 5. Thank you very much. I'm Josee van Haastrecht. First, I'd like to confirm on my behalf that the figures look good, but figures are also numbers, and I'm wondering how you could conceptualize these numbers with customers for the future of ING. I saw that in sustainability, the ING was reaching out mainly to existing customers, and the younger ones still have their entire life ahead of them. I wanted to say that the older customers are not only people who do not use these resources and want to do banking otherwise, but also that in this society, as a consequence of all these changes over the years, there are also millions of people who are vulnerable and will increasingly have to depend on others to take care of their business matters, such as those who suffer traffic accidents and as a consequence, are not able to care for themselves in all different ways, in part because of memory problems and learning new things. I'd like to start by noting that I discovered a new product on your site, and that was that the people who were involved in ING's art collections, I'm not sure that everybody understands this because I see some raised eyebrows. I see that there is an offer to advise the more affluent customers at ING on purchasing art. That brings me to the fact that part of this collection is not entirely free from the side. Part of the collection is attributed to Barings, that takes me to Barings Rostoks in 2007, that reminds me of Finn Paul's stock, that was somewhat controversial last year. My question is, in what measure, when Barings left, the management separated from ING, in what measure are there still direct links that might lead to some risk of exposure in banking in the future in Asia and Russia and beyond and elsewhere? About sustainability, my question is, how do you envisage connecting customers in Germany to the app? According to my information, far fewer people are connected to the internet than in the Netherlands, the number of people that uses this or has access opportunities is also far lower than in the Netherlands. Do you expect to be able to make that change in the next four years, and are you going to drive that change? The same holds true for other countries as far as the interconnectedness that you are advocating. I'd also like to ask you, what about the results of these changes, for example, the distribution and power of people to be in charge of their own financial resources. You've mentioned the app now in use in Spain, where petrol stations and supermarkets become intermediaries and accept the risk from the bank, whereas at first they had to purchase cash from the bank and pay for it. That's how it works in the Netherlands. That's not really the way I like to do business, for example. What's the story, how do you envisage the ING's future given globalization? If you have a shortage of IT people, then that will be scarce. We see that in other industries, that scarcity grows and grows, globally, you don't need as many people to offer the same project involving technologies. Just as Uber now earns 10% of everything that comes about, or there are temp agencies that operate more efficiently, too. That was it. Thank you. We'll start, I'll check the other questions. My answers around sustainability and coal-fired power plants and all that in one. I will come back to that later. I was speaking in English because those were asked by two people who were speaking in English. Even on the other question, primary customer definition. That goes over- The other primary customer definition. These concern customers with payment accounts here, and that comes into use as well as one other product. That's the definition of a primary customer. How do we remunerate our people in terms of improving the number of products per customer? We certainly don't do that individually. We do that over time, and we consider portfolio level. There is no specific link, but please keep in mind that we are increasingly speaking about cross-buy instead of cross-sell because a digital world without office is not an extremely specific interaction. If customers do more business with us, then it's specifically an action by the customer to do more business with us, whether it's by mobile phone or at their computer. That's the customer's initiative. We call that cross-buy instead of cross-sell because the initiative has to come from the customer. As for the question about the Westland Utrecht portfolio, that's still pending. That's an agreement we have. The mortgages and the interest date or the interest review date. At the interest review date, these mortgages will be sold to NN at least until the year 2020. The questions from that lady about, among other questions, elderly customers. You might be surprised, but specifically because of the transition from internet banking at the computer to mobile banking on an iPad and phone, elderly do far more digital banking because a lot of elderly like intuitive banking from an iPad better than working at a desktop holding a mouse, and they felt they need a special training to find their feet in the different ways the service was available. Whereas on an iPhone or an iPad or a digital smartphone, without trying to advertise for a specific brand, it's a far more intuitive process. We're seeing accelerated penetration among the elderly as well. That said, we have 250 or 260 offices nationwide, as well as a great many service points. In Belgium, where we have a lot of offices, a lot of places where the elderly can receive assistance and support, and they're welcome to come there. That's one of the reasons why it's important to retain offices and service points. As for your question about art management, we do have art management. The service we offer is one where our art management staff who maintain and develop our art collections because they have a lot of knowledge. They're also available in advising customers about purchasing works of art. It's not about purchasing works of art from us, but that a customer may be interested in a work of art that he or she noticed. Internet penetration in the different countries. Of course, we're delighted with the high internet penetration, and it's not only important for financial inclusiveness. It's becoming increasingly important to ensure that SMEs develop better and faster with the support from financial and other services via smartphones and the internet. This is to start up businesses in third world countries where you don't have vast cable networks. People use their mobile phone to provide grassroots economic support through mobile banking, and we welcome ongoing internet penetration. That's obvious. Around coal-fired power plants. Just to make one thing clear, we're not financing new asset-based coal plants. Yes, we are continuing corporate financing to companies of which the coal-fired power plants represent a lower percentage than 50%. Indeed, directly, we do finance then coal-fired power plants. In our relationship with those clients, we do have the conversations to see how they can further decrease the percentage of coal-fired power plants in their portfolio. For us, it's about an active engagement with our customers to see how coal-fired power plants as a percentage of total energy generation can further decrease. As part of our portfolio, I already mentioned the fact that out of the EUR 9 billion portfolio, 39% is fully renewable already. We're really making progress there, and that's crucial. On the two projects that you mentioned, the Cirebon project in Indonesia and the Punta Catalina project on the other side of the world, both are projects that we engaged with before change of our policy. That's one. Secondly, clearly, both will have to continue to fulfill Equator Principles and requirements. Otherwise, we will not finance them. The Punta Catalina is, at this moment, because of alleged bribery in front of a judge, there has not been any financing released under that loan. The Cirebon project, the environmental license was pulled, and therefore, we're not financing under that project until that environmental license is reinstated. That's basically the answer to that. Thank you very much. Thank you. We're now going to move on to agenda item 2E, which is voting in favor of the financial statements that was available online, and you could obtain it free of charge at the head office. Our auditor has issued an unqualified statement of approval. Here's the procedure. First, the auditor will deliver an introduction about that. That's Mr. Marc Hoogenboom, and then we'll continue with the agenda. Just for your information, we're about 45 minutes behind schedule, although we intended to wrap up at 6:00 P.M., we'll need your help to catch up on that backlog. Mr. Hoogenboom. Thank you, Chairman. I'm happy to use this opportunity to explain our involvement as external auditor. I'm Marc Hoogenboom. I'm the audit partner at KPMG, and I'm signing off as the external auditor for auditing the 2016 financial reports of ING Groep and ING Bank. The 2016 financial year is the first year audited by KPMG. ING has provided us with a written exemption from our non-disclosure obligation for this AGM so that I can elaborate on our audit for you. I'm going to tell you about this. The slide reflects the highlights of the duties we performed. In the section below that, you'll see the final outcome summarized for those who would like to read it. See page 337 for the first statement of unqualified approval. See page 68. There's something about internal control concerning financial reporting on pages 95 and 96, all with unqualified approval or effective. As for questions about our management letter in the auditor report, please see the chairman as well as pages 337 and 343, where you'll see our detailed statement about our audit. What did we audit? In keeping with our instructions, we audited the consolidated and other financial statements for the ING Groep and issued an unqualified audit opinion. In addition, we issued an unqualified audit opinion for the statutory annual report of some subsidiaries, and the ING Bank was the most important. Since the ING is also listed on the U.S. stock exchange, they need to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. In that context, we also issued a statement about the effectiveness of the internal audit concerning the financial reporting by the ING Groep. As I already mentioned, that's the last item in the blue box, and this was also an unqualified audit opinion. We issued an additional unqualified audit opinion for the financial statements to be submitted to the SEC, which is the Form 20-F. We also audited the ING Bank and ING Groep's half-year figures. With these interim figures, we issued an unqualified audit opinion. We also evaluated what was known as the sustainability information as included by the ING in its annual report and issued an unqualified audit opinion, which you'll find on page 68. Finally, regarding the statements by ING in the annual report, including those concerning corporate governance. We've read those. Based on our knowledge and our understanding obtained from auditing the financial statements, we did not find any material inaccuracies or conflicts with the financial statements that we audited. We have also noted that they contain the information required by law, as also noted in our audit opinion. I'll tell you about our lengthy audit statement. You'll see the summary there. I'll walk you through it first. Our statement. Based on our duties, we have concluded that the financial statements offer an accurate impression of the financial position on 31 December 2016 and the results for that 2016 financial year. The financial statements were drafted on the assumption that operations would continue. Based on our duties, we've concluded that this assessment on the part of management is appropriate. As for our independence, we are globally independent of ING Groep and its subsidiaries, and that's been the case since 1 October 2015. This meant that 2016 was the first year that we audited the financial statements of ING Groep. In the run-up to our first audit, we performed additional duties, such as attending important meetings with the previous auditor, evaluating the audit file globally to gain an understanding of the audit approach, and had many discussions with ING staff and management. Materiality, as you see listed there as well. Our materiality in auditing the ING Groep's consolidated financial statements amounts to EUR 240 million. The explanatory notes about the remuneration of the board members is based on a much lower materiality because accuracy of this explanation requires that all observed and uncorrected differences above EUR 10 are communicated in writing to the audit committee and the supervisory board. Our audit scope. In addition to being the external auditor of ING in the Netherlands, we serve in this capacity in virtually all countries where ING is active. We determine where and in what depth the audit needs to take place. The results of the local audits is evaluated and discussed by us with our teams on-site as well as with ING in the Netherlands. In addition, we visit the most important countries one or multiple times a year and assess the records from those local audits. Significant risks or key audit matters, which you will see in that purple pie slice as well. A significant risk is a risk that we have acknowledged and estimated the material deviation that, in our view, needs to be given special attention during the audit. Significant risks often concern significant non-routine transactions or matters that require applying an evaluation. Regarding significant risks, we have gained insight into the internal management activities of ING relating to these risks. In addition, we have performed specific data-focused duties to determine that the risk will not lead to a material deviation in the financial statements. In our audit for 2016, we identified the following risks, and you will see them listed there. Provision for lending losses, access management to IT systems, insecurity in assessing the provision for other aspects. In our audit statement, wherever possible, there is a reference to the page where these highlights of the audit or this so-called key audit matters are explained by ING. I would like to tell you about the provision for lending losses and access management to IT systems. Because of the significance of the credit portfolio for the total financial statements and the related insecurity of assessment, we regard valuing loans as core in the audit. Please see note 1 in the financial statements, principles of valuation and determination of results, and of course, the risk management paragraph in the annual report. Based on the duties we performed, we concluded that the estimates we made are reasonable and agree with the related explanations in the financial statement. The second key audit matter, as I mentioned, is the IT infrastructure. IT infrastructure is crucial for the ING Groep in terms of reliability and continuity of operations and financial reporting. In 2016, ING Groep invested efforts in improving its IT systems and procedures and to enhance reliability and continuity of automated data processing. Management was particularly attentive to access rights concerning the different IT applications, operating systems, and databases that are of direct importance to its financial reporting. These access rights are important to safeguard that access and changes in these applications and data have been correctly authorized. Given the huge impact of IT on the organization, we have regarded this issue as one of the core points in our audit. Based on the duties we performed, such as testing the effectiveness of internal control of the IT organization and carrying various additional data-oriented duties, we concluded that we have sufficient foundation to rely on proper functioning of these IT systems. In our report to the audit committee of the supervisory board, we did make some additional recommendations concerning improving IT controls and management of access rights in particular. Please see pages 56 and 313 in the annual report for additional information. Thank you for listening. Mr. Chairman, I'm pleased to give you back. Thank you for your lengthy explanation. This is a voting item. I prefer to proceed directly to the vote, but officially you have the opportunity to ask questions, Mr. Kander. I'm Mr. Kander from the VVD. I have two questions. One, I should ask you or the executive board, the other to the auditor. First, the question to the firm. Switching auditors was a source of controversy in which opponents are at loggerheads. You've seen it at this firm. The bottom line is that it was an awful lot of work and effort. Do you assess after everything is done and dusted that this was worthwhile? Have you learned anything from changing auditors, and do you have a fresh impression of things? If you have learned anything, are there new assessments or recommendations that you didn't know in the past, for example, concerning improving control mechanisms? Was switching auditors worthwhile? My second question is to the auditor himself who did the audit. I would assume that if you're auditing a firm with complexity and scale of ING, you sometimes discuss this with coworkers in your global and European organization. Assuming that you spoke with coworkers who may have audited other banks that you might learn from, how would you qualify your audit of the ING? Was it average, not too bad, or too conservative or more aggressive? I would like KPMG to tell me that based on their experience in auditing the books of large banks, because it's hard for us to fathom as outsiders. I'll ask the auditor to answer question two first so that I can think about question one. Thank you for your question. Yes. We are in extensive contact with our colleagues abroad, especially with those who audit very large banks. Of course, you coordinate your insights and the audit system. The first year is obviously a major challenge given the scope and complexity. At the same time, of course, you pay a lot of attention to valuations of loans, derivatives, and other instruments, and you try to form an assessment. Officially you'll see that assessment in the summary. At the same time, that wasn't what you asked. Your question was a bit broader than that. Considering my own experience and that of my coworkers, I think that I would express it in correct English as mildly cautious, neutral to mildly cautious. That was clear as a bell. Thank you. First of all, the change was a regulatory requirement, we had to comply with that. I think in terms of qualitatively, it's always helpful to have a fresh set of eyes, someone new. It's human nature when you build a relationship with a firm or auditors that you think you get to know each other. It is very helpful and healthy to have a company come in, completely fresh set of eyes and ask lots of questions. Many of which, you might think, "Well, we've answered that before." The challenge of going through it all again, it's a lot of work, but it does add value. That was valuable. This is a matter of principle. The principle is that it's healthy for everybody to take another look, is the conclusion that there was no significant outcome, is that a new conclusion? Apparently, the conclusions from the previous auditor were comparable with those of the new one, have new insights arisen based on the discussions with KPMG? That's what I asked. Not to the extent that the chairman observed. It might be a bit premature to write this up to history, I think it basically entailed more costs and effort than returns. That's the initial evaluation. I see three people who want to ask questions. That's all. Please be concise. We're running way behind schedule. Don't deliver long speeches. Please ask direct focus questions. 364 is the sequence. I'm still Mr. Spanjer. As you know, I'm always brief. My question is about big data. Of course, big data are very sensitive for cybersecurity, your company, the BSN numbers are especially useful for people with bad intentions. They're very welcome numbers, the BSN numbers. How did you or the auditor check whether your measures were sufficient? That wasn't explained, big data hit the papers in early March on the part of the auditor and was announced as a big issue. How did he deal with this, how will he deal with it in 2017? I didn't hear him say a word about that, I didn't read anything about that either. Thank you. We're going to gather all the questions. I'm Mr. Dekker, Mr. Chairman. First, a very brief suggestion. There's a lied or a sea song from my childhood, I propose that in the future, people asking questions do not ask questions about carbon dioxide longer than that song is, you might want to convene a separate conference. My first question about the ING Bank, I have a few questions about the whistleblower concerns, part of that question is directed to your auditor. In the bank report on page 294, we see a section, breaches and unethical behavior, that figure is up sharply since 2015. My question is, what does this mean? Is this coincidence? Are you saying that's in fact very good because things that might have been simmering are brought to the surface faster? Do you say this is an area of concern? Possibly because the world is becoming progressively unmanageable because, well, things can happen. Specifically, in what measure does the auditor feel that this is a clear concern? Or are you saying, let's leave this to the ING? Following from that, the question is, are there new hacking practices? Consider the large number of countries where the ING operates, and you want to streamline some of the fields in those countries, but I can imagine that it might facilitate hackers. How does the auditor assess the risks, and how does the firm feel about those risks? Thank you. Mr. Van den Bosch. Thank you, Mr. Van der Veer. I was the first one at the microphone, but that's just a minor detail. I have a question to the auditor. Does he apply the same audit procedure as Vince Leong, the predecessor? Ernst & Young. If not, how does he deviate from Ernst & Young? As for your management letter, does this one for 2016 contain fewer items than from 2015? In the annual report, what I don't see, and the auditor or signing partner auditor, I don't see the name, and I don't see the signature at the bottom of that agenda item in the annual report. I think it would be good form to see it. The auditor says we determine the scope. Quite simply, the scope costs more time, and more time costs more money. Or does KPMG say, we accepted this job at this amount and we'll determine the scope, and if we encounter any matters, then we won't make as much money. Another point, if I was paying attention properly, the auditor told that the ING was reasonable. That would be between six and seven out of 10. From what I know of Mr. Hamers, he'd be aiming for eight or higher on a scale of 10. The qualification of the auditor, either reasonable is rightly between six and seven, or he means that it was good and we would score an eight. Those were my points, Mr. Van der Veer. Mr. Van den Bosch, I'll start with your very last question. If an auditor says it's reasonable, that's almost 10 out of 10. All the answers are- The other answers, the auditor will answer those answers. May I correct you? I remember, but I'm a nuisance, and you know I'm a nuisance, that the auditor for the oil reserves said that it was excellent, and then it turned out that it was one big quagmire. Directors were sent away, and that you had to take over because everybody was jumping ship. Anyway. I get it. I get what you're referring to. Ms. Hoogenboom. I jotted down many questions, so let me just start by answering a couple of questions, and I'm sure that if I overlook one or two, that you will correct me. First question about signing, not with my personal name, but my company name. These are rules that are relevant, particularly in the U.S. You're a good reader, you read that his statement concerning internal control is signed as KPMG accountants. That is according to Sarbanes-Oxley, and the other reports are signed in accordance with Dutch legislation with my first name and my last. Another question about data security. I think this is an important element, perhaps in addition to my quite detailed presentation, I'd like to highlight that data security is essential. If we're talking about access control of IT systems, it's important to separate things, and the question is whether data have been sufficiently secured. As I pointed out, this has been safeguarded sufficiently and there's room for improvement. The number of points in my management letter as compared to last year. I didn't count the number of key points, nor did I compare it with the number of key points last year. You'll have to get a rain check on that. There are a number of things that I had pointed out before, and I mentioned that, and this in the framework of key audit matters. A question about scope and materiality. We comply with the rules in that respect. Compared to the previous auditor, I believe materiality was slightly lower, which we thought might be a good idea to do in the first-year audit because you really want to take an in-depth look at all the numbers, particularly in the first year. Scope and depth boils down to the fact that in any case, the large countries for ING, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, those countries are subjected to full-scope audit with the greatest possible depth, and also the coverage of all the assets and profits that are being generated. That is what I took down. I hope I've addressed all the questions. If not, a question about the whistleblower report. What was the question precisely? Whether the increase under breach of conduct and the reduction in other categories, whether anything could be inferred from that. With all due respect, our audit is not the whistleblower regulation. The whistleblower regulation did not lead to any changes in the audit approach or anything related to that. Perhaps a bit more specific, you're skipping an important part of my question, that part concerned hacking. Yes. My name is Van de Bos, I had the exact same comment. My name is Hogeboom. Pleased to meet you. Okay. Hacking. Yes. The so-called cyber risk. As part and parcel of our risk analysis and planning, we take a very close look at the risks and the control measures that have been taken to that effect, those control measures are also scrutinized, that applies to access management for IT systems, also cyber risk. You also look at track record, in this case, of ING. So far, fortunately, in the field of cyber risk attacks, I think we can qualify that safely as good, we didn't identify any additional risks as part and parcel of our audit. Yes, I'm going to close this session, we're running behind. Mr. van der Veer, I simply had a question. The management letter, this is the last thing that is presented from the audit method. That's how I always understood it, that's how I used to work in our internal accountant service. It's very simple. You have a management letter of the previous year, which would be 2015 in this case, with about 30 points, then you check which points have been carried out. You have the new auditor, who comes in in 2016, that has 40 points, then you compare the two. That was the gist of my question. The number of points in the management letter, has this number increased or decreased as compared to the previous year? On that basis, you can draw conclusions that the company is more in control, less in control. It's a very simple question, you can give a very straightforward answer. Nothing difficult about it. Well, the auditor also replied by saying that he hadn't counted those items. No, this is what you present as an auditor. This is the last thing you do. I must say, that I have to give this auditor a 3 out of 10, which is insufficient. It's a D. I hear your question. I'm sure if you're going to ask the question next year that the auditor will have an answer and will count the numbers. First of all, I'd like to close this session. First of all, I'm going to show you on the screen how many shares are present or represented. Mr. Fink, can we show this on screen? These are big numbers. I wouldn't even dare to round them off. This is information for you, now I'd like to proceed to the vote and the vote on item 2E, which is the financial statement. I'd like to give the floor to Mr. Fink. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Most of you are familiar with the voting procedure, I'll briefly repeat it for you. You all received a voting card and a handset. Please insert the card in the handset with the gold-colored chip facing towards you. Once you've inserted it, you will see a welcome message on the screen. Once the vote is opened, you have three options. You can vote in favor, you should press 1. Vote against, press 2, 3 is abstention. You get a confirmation of your choice. During the vote, you can still change your choice. You can again press 1, 2, or 3, the last button you pressed will then be valid and will be included in the vote. This is the voting procedure, I shall now proceed to the vote on item 2E, which is the annual accounts for 2016. The vote is open. You may now cast your vote. 1 is in favor, 2 is against, 3 is abstention. If you've all cast your votes, just looking around to see whether everybody's okay. Just waiting for a message. The vote is closed, let's await the results. I can see the results. Can you see it? You see, Can I round it off, Mr. Van den Bosch? I would estimate almost 100%. The annual accounts have been adopted. I'm proceeding to the next item of the agenda, which is item 3A and 3B, which is the profit retention distribution policy. You'll be able to read about that in the annual report, pages 59 through 61. ING wants to maintain a healthy core capital ratio, which is now 11.75%. I apologize for the technical jargon, this has got to do with the counter-cyclical capital buffer, which is negligible at this stage, plus a comfortable management buffer that also includes Pillar 2 guidance. You have the 11.75%. Whatever the situation may be with the current ratio of 14.2 as per December 2016. At year-end, we complied with all the requirements for all these ratios. ING also aims at paying out a progressive dividend. Mr. Spanjer, we know that you object. Of course, we've got to be prepared for expected future capital requirements and also our growth potential, there's some uncertainties and developments in legislation and rules and regulations. You can ask questions about this in a minute, first of all, I'd like to deal with the dividend for 2016, which you'll also find on page 61. It is based on the net earnings of I won't round it off, EUR 4.61 billion, after accretion to the reserves of EUR 2.091 billion. There's EUR 2.560 billion left, it is a proposal to pay out a dividend of EUR 0.66 for 2016. EUR 0.24 had already been paid out, there's another EUR 0.42 to go. The Supervisory Board proposes or recommends that this proposal be adopted. Do you have any questions, or can we proceed to the vote? Mr. Stevens? Please be brief. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In view of rules and regulations that are quite uncertain, we would appreciate it should you offer us an optional dividend. Yes. Well, you have a leverage of four, that would be a hinging point. More shares or more cash? I get your question. Patrick, please. You're asking about whether we should offer script alternatives? We've looked at this. We've polled interest from shareholders, they're firmly against. They want cash and cash only. It's almost unanimous will of the majority of our shareholder base. Right. Okay. Let's proceed to the vote. Who should do that? Mr. Fink is going to do that. Let us vote on 3B, dividend 2016. You can now cast your vote for this item on the agenda. The vote is open. Once you've cast your vote, looking round, I can now close the vote. Let's wait for the results for 3B. The dividend proposal has been carried. Thank you very much for that. I'd like to proceed to agenda item 4A, discharge members of the executive board in respect of their duties performed during the year 2016. I would like to refer to the notice of the meeting and the agenda 4A. You're requested to grant discharge to the executive board for the year 2016, which means discharge on the annual report to the report of the executive board, corporate governance chapter, the chapter section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the remuneration report, the statements made in the annual general meeting. Can I put this to the vote? Thank you. We can now proceed to the vote. You can vote on item 4A, discharge the members of the executive board. Vote is open. If everybody's cast their vote for this item on the agenda, I would now like to close the vote. Let's just wait for the results on the screen. This proposal has also been carried. 4B now, which is exactly the same thing. It's what I just read for agenda item 4A, now for the supervisory board. It is my pleasure to proceed to the vote on the release of liabilities of the members of the supervisory board. The vote is open. Trust Mr. Fink. You can now cast your vote regarding the release liability of the members of the supervisory board. If everybody's cast their vote, I can close the vote. We can wait for the results. Discharge has been granted. Let us proceed to 5A. 5A and 5B will be discussed in sequence. Only afterwards will you be given the opportunity to raise questions or make comments. 5A. This concerns an amendment to the deferral period in the remuneration policy for members of the executive board. We're addressing this item. It has been explained on page 104 of the annual report. I'd like to give the floor to Mr. Broekink. Thank you. The European Banking Authority, EBA, has issued guidelines on stating that the deferral period for variable remuneration of members of the executive board should at least be five years. In this context, the remuneration policy of the executive board is changed to such an extent that the deferral period for the variable remuneration is extended from three to five years, in which every year, one-fifth portion becomes unconditional. There's also a retention period that is to be applied of five years as from the time at which the shares have been conditionally grant. Once they're vested, there's a minimum retention period of one year. Now, this will be applied for the first time in 2018 regarding the variable remuneration for the performance year 2017. Or rather, the assessment year 2017. Shall I continue? 5B, the limit of variable remuneration for selected number of employees worldwide. I'd like to report to the annual report, pages 97, 98, and the proposal with explanatory note included in the notice of the meeting under agenda item 5B. In accordance with European and national rules and regulations, financial companies may increase their granting of variable remuneration from 100% to 200% of the fixed remuneration component for individual employees outside the European Economic Area. In 2015, the AGM of ING Groep has given an authorization to increase the maximum percentage to 200% in the assessment years 2014 to 2016. Given the international context in which ING operates, and also in order to be able to maintain its competitive edge, the Executive Board and Supervisory Board would like to have the opportunity to have an increased maximum percentage and would like to continue this outside the European Economic Area for a period of five assessment years. That would be from 2017 to 2021. ING will use this possibility restrictively and for a maximum of 1% of the total number of global ING employees. Thank you. We have to put this to the vote unless there are questions. Mr. Veerenberg. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Breukink indicated earlier on that ING pursues a modest or moderate remuneration policy. You even said that you don't want to push up the remuneration standards, and you also stated that you're below the median earn remuneration. You also indicated that that is a tough situation, and we understand that given the international context. We're very much in favor of a moderate remuneration policy in those companies that we invest in. We do this worldwide. In 2015, when these maximums were established, 100% for variable remuneration, possible increase with the approval of the AGM to 200%, and that was put to the AGM in 2015 for the first time. The idea to increase it to 200% is that they could be perverse incentives, we agreed with that for 2015. This is a position that we maintain now that you are requesting this authorization. That is the reason why we will be voting against this proposal, just as we did in 2015. We do understand that for a company such as ING with international operations, this can be difficult. We also think that ING has many more things to offer its employees, also outside the European Economic Area, other than this financial incentive. We would continue to insist on that, we will also call on companies elsewhere in the world to continue this moderate remuneration and not to drive up the level of remuneration. This is a message that we are communicating, that's also a reason why we cannot go along with the proposal such as this one and will be voting against. We have just heard your comment and your message. Can we proceed to the vote? Yes, we can now vote. Agenda item 5B, the limit variable remuneration for selected global staff worldwide. The vote is open. Let me just check to see whether all the votes have been cast. They have been. The vote is closed, and we'll be waiting for the results for 5B. Thank you. The proposal has been adopted. I'd like to proceed to item six of the agenda, which is the composition of the executive board. First of all, the reappointment of Mr. Ralph Hamers, which is a voting item. We will address this. You'll find explanatory note under 6A, the Supervisory Board for this reappointment has made a binding nomination in accordance with the Article of Association. You saw this binding nomination in the information convening the meeting. The proposal is to reappoint Mr. Hamers as a member of the Executive Board as per the end of this AGM until the end of the AGM to be held in 2021. We would like to do so because he's been an excellent CEO. He has made valuable contributions over this period of time and his skills in realizing the accelerated Think Forward strategy. Can we put this to the vote? Would you like to ask a question? Please use the microphone. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Bruning. I am a small shareholder from Rotterdam. Most of the biggest part of this meeting focuses on the past. Now we're dealing with something that concerns the future. That is why at other AGMs, I always ask for further explanation from these people, why they want to be appointed, what are the reasons that they want to continue to work with the company. There are nine appointments that we're going to vote on. I don't have to listen to all these motivations. I would like to hear from Mr. Hamers and Mr. Balkenende what their reasons are to stay with the company or to join the company. That's not the idea. I respect your ideas. You listened to Mr. Hamers in his presentation. I'm quite prepared to give Mr. Hamers the opportunity to explain why he still wants to continue as a CEO. I'm not going to ask other nominees to explain their motivation. The nominations have been made, and it is up to us to check whether they have the skills and the motivation. You're very strict. Actually, you're the most strict chairman of all the AGMs. I really don't know why unless there are a lot of bad things going on you don't want to talk about, Mr. Hamers. During my presentation, I talked about the results in the past. I also talked about challenges in the future, which I find very interesting. ING is a wonderful company. I would love to continue to work for such a wonderful, marvelous company. The vote, Mr. Fink. Mr. Van der Veer, I do have another question. I'm sorry, Mr. Van den Bosch, I hadn't seen you. That's okay. Mr. Van den Bosch. I'm pleased that Mr. Hamers has presented himself as a candidate to continue to do this job as CEO for another four years. If we compare his work to his predecessor, this is very refreshing. There's a big difference between what he does and Mr. Hommen does. I think it's great the way he speaks off the top of his head. There's just one comment. That applies to the appointment of three executive directors. This is theoretical. Three, there are two new ones, and there's one that is going to be reappointed. Imagine, in four years time, what if everybody votes against? We would be dealing with a bank without an executive board. I do not know whether you realize that. I would say this is a point of weakness. The same point of weakness, I would just like to extrapolate this to the supervisory board, because out of the eight supervisory directors, six are being reappointed. What if next time everybody votes against them, you lose your entire supervisory board, which I would consider to be a sign of weakness. If there's any possibility to improve this, I would. This is precisely the work the nomination committee does. The committee makes all sorts of plannings and things. The outcome of that process is what we present to you today in the context of the new appointments and reappointments. Of course, you can plan ahead for four years. You can make all sorts of scenarios, which is, in fact, what we do. You always have to keep in mind that there may be unexpected changes and surprises. Mr. Van der Veer, I know full well that the remuneration committee deals with this. I am just saying that three executive directors are being appointed. One is reappointed, two are being appointed. Assuming that in four years time, we have to vote on this matter again, what if people vote against, that you only get 49% of the votes, so the executive board is not reappointed? You will have a problem. You will have a bank without a board. What if Mr. Nagel would present himself for reappointment, or Mr. Flynn would present himself for reappointment? Mr. Nagel, we would vote against. Mr. Hamers, we would vote against. You would have only one person from the executive board, Mr. Flynn, who would be reappointed, and you could provide some sort of continuity. Which concerns me just as well in the case of the supervisory board. It is not about what the remuneration committee does. I know perfectly well what it does. It is just a sign of weakness. It is just like with write-offs. If you evaluate something at 100% and you want to write it off in five years, you do 20% a year. That is not what is going on here, which is a sign of weakness. As the chairman of the remuneration committee, I understood your comment full well, Mr. Van den Bosch. We will now proceed to the vote. You can vote on item 6A, which is the reappointment of Mr. Hamers. The vote has been opened. 6A. I am just looking around to see whether everybody has cast their vote. If so, I can now close the vote. Let us wait for the results for item 6A. Mr. Hamers, congratulations. A big hand, please. We can now proceed to 6B, which is the appointment of Steven van Rijswijk. We are not going to. I am saying this to the shareholder from Rotterdam. We are not going to give him the floor to explain what the reasons are for him to want this job. I do think it is a good idea for Steven van Rijswijk to briefly introduce himself. Steven. Good afternoon. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. My name is Steven van Rijswijk. I've been working for ING almost 22 years, all sorts of sectors. I've lived all over the world. It would be an honor for me to continue to work on the Think Forward strategy and the Executive Board, more specifically, the risk function. The appointment of Mr. Steven van Rijswijk is based on the way he is performing his current position as Global Head Client Coverage and member of the ING committee. Uses his capacity in different positions at ING in the field of corporate finance. I would like to put this appointment to the vote, unless you have questions. We can now proceed to the vote. You can vote on item 6B, the agenda appointment, Mr. Steven van Rijswijk. The vote is open. Votes have been cast. We can close the vote. We're waiting for the results. Steven, congratulations. Ga ik over tot de benoeming van Koos- That takes me to the appointment of Koos Timmermans. Koos Timmermans. Just a moment. The proposed appointment of Koos Timmermans has been approved by the European Central Bank. The highlights of the contract of Koos Timmermans have been posted on the corporate website. The Supervisory Board proposes appointing Koos Timmermans per the end of this meeting until, as Mr. Van der Bos just mentioned, the meeting in 2021. The nomination of Mr. Timmermans arises from his valuable contribution as Deputy Chairman at ING Bank in his current term of office and his position as Chief Risk Officer. He was already a member of the Executive Board from October 2007 until November 2011, is broadly knowledgeable about finance and control. We will now proceed to the vote on agenda item 6b, the appointment of Mr. Koos Timmermans as a member of the Executive Board. Please cast your vote. Als u klaar bent met stemmen. If you finished voting, I will now close the vote and we will wait for the outcome. Koos, congratulations. That takes us to six appointments for reappointments relating to the Supervisory Board. First, the reappointment of Mr. Hermann-Josef Lamberti as a Supervisory Board member per the end of this meeting. The Supervisory Board has made a binding nomination for this appointment. This binding nomination and the data concerning the candidate appear in the convocation notice at 7a. The nomination for reappointment is based on his in-depth knowledge of international firms, financial services, HR, and IT, and the way that he served as vice chairman of the Supervisory Board, member of the Audit Committee, and member of the Risk Committee in his prior term of office. That takes me to the vote. Mr. Fehrenbach. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a few remarks. I wanted to make them at this agenda item. They'll also relate to subsequent appointments because last year when Mrs. Sherry was appointed, I asked some questions about her residence in Australia, and I asked whether she would be able to attend your board's meetings in person. We exchanged some ideas based on the data in the annual report. We saw a very high turnout of Supervisory Board, so our concerns were baseless. Thank you. We have also taken note of additional explanation at item 7a at Mr. Lamberti's reappointment concerning his Supervisory Board memberships in number. That was after the convocation notice for the AGM and had been posted on your website. That helps us and makes clear that the gentleman's number of Supervisory Board memberships is in compliance with regulations, and we welcome that. In a moment at 7e, we will also hear Mrs. Haase's nomination, and in that case, too, the number of Supervisory Board memberships is a point of consideration. We are making our vote conditional on whether you can tell us in what term you envisage that being brought in line and at that agenda item. We will cast our vote hoping that Mrs. Haase can start her duties. The way that he chaired the Risk Committee and has served as a member of the Audit and Remuneration Committees during his present term of office. May I open the vote? Please go ahead. I'm opening the vote on agenda item 7B, the reappointment of Robert Reibestein to the Supervisory Board. Please cast your vote. Yeah. [Foreign language] If you have all cast your vote, I will now close the vote, and we will await the outcome. Robert, congratulations. 7C is my own reappointment. Of course, I can't cover that one for you. I'm going to hand over the floor to Mr. Broekink. Mr. Broekink, we will now discuss the reappointment of Jeroen van der Veer per the end of this AGM. Please see the convening notice, agenda item 7C, and the supervisory board has issued a binding recommendation comprising the data at agenda item 7C, and the supervisory board recommends reappointing Jeroen van der Veer to the supervisory board per the end of this general meeting through the end of the annual general meeting to be held in 2018. The explanation is that the proposed reappointment of Jeroen van der Veer derives from his broad experience managing large international listed firms and his knowledge of international trade and industry, and his greatly appreciated contribution as chairman of the supervisory board and the nominations committees, as well as membership of the risk, remuneration, and corporate governance committees. The supervisory board intends for Hans Wijers, hereafter to be mentioned at 7F, will succeed Jeroen van der Veer as chairman of the supervisory board immediately following the end of the 2018 AGM. Therefore, the supervisory board proposes to the AGM that Jeroen van der Veer be reappointed to the supervisory board for a one-year term concluding immediately after the end of the 2018 AGM. I'll open the floor to any questions. Otherwise, we will start voting on this item. If there are no questions, we will start the vote. Now, on to the vote on agenda item 7C, reappointment of Jeroen van der Veer. Please cast your vote. Dan sluit ik nu de stemming. I will now close the vote and await the outcome. We're pleased to congratulate Jeroen. One more year. Now on to agenda item 7D, appointment of Jan Peter Balkenende. I think this question is hardly necessary for the Dutch, but perhaps you'd like to introduce yourself to the meeting anyway. I'm Jan Peter Balkenende. After serving as prime minister, I became a professor in Rotterdam. I'm now a professor and partner of corporate responsibility at EY. Last year, because I hit the retirement age of 65, I'm now an external consultant, and am involved with the foundation and hope to dedicate my efforts to this magnificent firm. Thank you. I've just realized that I skipped Mr. Timmermans in the introduction. Perhaps we can compensate for that, first we're going to open the vote on Mr. Balkenende. Mr. Stevens. Those who are part of the SRB had a lot of objection with the tax assessment by Mrs. Kroes, amounting to EUR 1.3 billion. Perhaps we could brainstorm about this. This happened during the period that Mr. Balkenende was a prime minister, and we hope that he'll do something about returning the EUR 1.3 billion through shareholders' dividend. That sounds like a wonderful idea. We'll proceed to the vote. I am opening the vote on agenda item 7D, the appointment of Jan Peter Balkenende to the supervisory board. Please cast your vote. Ik zie dat u allemaal uw stem heeft uitgebracht. I see that you have all cast your vote. I'm now closing the vote. We will await the outcome for item 7D. Jan Peter, congratulations. Dan ga ik nu over tot de benoeming. That takes us to the appointment of Mrs. Haase at 7E. In the meantime, as an explanation to what Mr. Fehrenbach said, she still has a responsible position. That's why we can't pinpoint the date of aligning her supervisory board responsibility. The reason we're proposing her now rather than next year is because we expect to reach the desired point between now and next year. If we were able to pinpoint the date any more accurately, we would have indicated that. This is where we stand now. We thought that this procedure would be the most appropriate because shareholders generally don't really like extraordinary general meetings. We didn't want to convene everybody for an extraordinary general meeting. First, I'll ask Mrs. Haase to introduce herself. Then we'll explain why we propose her. Mrs. Haase. My name is Margarethe Haase. I would be glad to serve as a supervisory board member of this wonderful bank, ING, because I think I'm able to contribute with my financial and industrial experience. Since 2009, I am CFO of Deutz AG, a listed company, an engine maker. 22 years I was working for Daimler AG in numerous positions in the financial, HR, and industrial area. I started my career 30 years ago in the banking industry. Thank you for your trust and for your attention. Thank you. Just as with all other proposals today, I won't read it all out, the proposals have been approved by the European Central Bank. As previously indicated, we will communicate and publish a date later on. We are proposing Mrs. Margarethe Haase because of her great track record of success and of service in finance and audit and her experience in board and non-board offices at many companies and institutions in Germany. May I now open the vote? We are now opening the vote. Agenda item 7E, the appointment of Margarethe Haase is now being voted on. Please cast your vote. If everybody has cast their vote, I will now close the vote, and we will await the outcome. Margarethe, congratulations. On to agenda item 7F, the appointment of Hans Wijers. Hans, would you please tell everybody briefly who you are? Good afternoon. I'm Hans Wijers. I'm presently a supervisory board member of various companies and used to be in charge of a large international firm. I also served as Minister of Economic Affairs for some time. I'm impressed at the ING's position, healthy balance sheet, clear strategy, culture of enterprise, and I'd be delighted to contribute in the future. Thank you very much. The recommendation of Hans Wijers is based on his international profile, his very extensive political network, his knowledge and experience in both managing and supervising large international firms. It doesn't say football clubs, very well. Margarethe. What did you say? The idea is that Mr. Wijers, on September 1, 2017, will start, as already stated at the subsequent end of the 2018 AGM, he would succeed me as chair. I understand there's a question. I'm Mr. Spanjer. I'm still Mr. Spanjer. In your introduction at the start of this meeting, I asked a question about the agenda, and I said I wasn't very satisfied about the person with 26 supervisory board memberships and seven chairmanships. I don't appreciate a watered-down version of this either. Did you reach any agreements about this? You're saying that he's going to succeed you next year, we do have a code to observe. There is a restriction. Did you make any arrangements about that? Thank you. At present, Mr. Wijers is in compliance with all items in the code, we envisage that he will continue complying with them when he becomes chairman. He's in compliance. Did you talk to him about that before you proposed him? I'm not going to get into details. I said we are compliant, and we expect to remain compliant. Okay. We'll wait and see. Now, I'd like- Mr. Van der Veer, that's me again. I'm Mr. Van den Bosch. You're all lit up now. You're in the limelight. I have a question directly to Mr. Wijers. I would really like to ask my question. It's very simple. Mr. Wijers, which football club do you support? Can you answer this? I have no idea. I'll have to ask Mr. Wijers. That's why I wanted to ask him directly. That saves time. Ajax. I'm happy that Mr. Hommen is no longer here because Mr. Hommen supports Roda JC. There's some other members of your management team supporting Excelsior or I think Sparta. I'm happy that we've got an Ajax fan among us now. We'll have to manage with this. Yes. I forgot that you support the football team of The Hague. That's okay. We're going to proceed with the vote. No football scores. We're voting on agenda item 7F, which is the appointment of Mr. Wijers. Please cast your vote. If you've all cast your vote, I'll close the vote, and we'll wait the outcome of 7F. Congratulations, Hans. Now, I'd like to correct my failure to give Koos Timmermans a chance to introduce himself. Koos, could you please do this? You've already passed muster, so you don't have anything to worry about. All I can do is disappoint you from this point, but nonetheless, I would like to tell you that I'm delighted to be here. 10 years ago, I was here too, what's wonderful is that I see so many familiar faces in the auditorium, that's wonderful because it means people are holding onto their shares for the long term, I'm trying to contribute a long-term strategy for the firm based on the past decade. Thank you, Koos. On to agenda item 8A and 8B. These agenda items concern the authority of the executive board to issue new shares, the proposals to be addressed in this meeting correspond with the proposals that were adopted at the AGM in 2016. The authorization to issue up to 40% of the issued capital plus authorization to issue up to 10% of the issued capital. These authorizations to issue offer greater flexibility than the authorizations requested before 2016 will better enable ING Groep to respond quickly, if necessary, to, for example, unfavorable trends on the financial markets, as confirmed in the consultation of important shareholders in the corporate governance review in 2015/2016. These authorizations are moreover in sync with international market practices. At agenda item 8A, it's an authorization to issue 40% of issued capital. To avoid any misunderstandings, this would equal a nominal amount, so that's a much smaller amount than the value of the shares, equaling about EUR 15.5 million. The authorization will apply for 18 months unless the general meeting extends it. The executive and supervisory boards emphasize that ING intends to do everything reasonably possible to respect preemptive rights of shareholders and avert dilution in accordance with the applicable legislation and regulation. Additional information about how, if the case arises, preemptive rights of shareholders will be addressed figures in the 2016 annual report on pages 68 to 79. The supervisory board has approved the proposal. This authorization will replace the one issued at the previous general meeting at agenda item 9A. The floor is now open for questions. This is a proposal concerning a rights issue. Jan-Willem, we're going to vote separately on 8A and 8B. I'd like to vote on 8A unless you have questions. Mr. Fehrenbach. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As you indicated, last year, you changed the authorization to issue, and that was adopted with the large majority. We expressed our objections at the time concerning the higher authorization for the ING. This remains exceptional in the Dutch context. We were also in a lengthy dialogue with the ING. We greatly appreciated that, unfortunately, it did not lead you to change your proposal this year and not what we had requested last year, which was to curtail the use of this authorization to issue under normal circumstances. We wanted to say that we perfectly understand that in a financial emergency, the ING would want to have and use this instrument as a financial institution, we'd like to limit it to that, and we don't want it to be used for mergers and acquisitions. We'll repeat our position from last year, and we'll be voting against this proposal. Thank you. Yes, there was an informal discussion as to whether there was a meeting of the minds. I thought we were awfully close. Unfortunately, we did not resolve the disagreement, we certainly understand your position, and I am now opening the vote. The vote is on agenda item 8A, authorization to issue ordinary shares in accordance with the proposal. Please cast your vote. Looking around the room. If everybody has cast their vote, I will close the vote and await the outcome of the vote on agenda item 8A. Thank you. The proposal has been adopted. Now on to agenda item 8B. That's the authorization to issue 10% without what is generally known as a rights issue. This is entirely in accordance with last year. May I open the vote on this? Thank you. We will open the vote. I'm opening the vote on agenda item 8B, the authorization to issue ordinary shares with or without preemptive rights. Please cast your vote. Dan sluit ik nu de stemming en wachten op de uitslag op 8B. We'll close the vote and we're waiting for the outcome on 8B. This proposal has been adopted, as you can see. Thank you very much. Now, agenda item nine. It's always very confusing because at first you want to issue shares, and now we want to acquire shares, which is generally known as repurchasing shares. See the explanation. It's up to a maximum 10% of the issued capital and is valid for 18 months. There are rules about the maximum acquisition price. It's all been announced. May I open the vote on this proposal? Thank you. We will now vote. You may cast your vote on agenda item nine, which is the authorization to acquire ordinary shares in the company's capital. Please cast your vote. Als u allemaal gestemd heeft. You've all cast your vote. I am now going to close the vote and await the outcome. Thank you. The proposal has been adopted. We're starting to forge ahead. Very good. Now, is that true? That takes us to any other business and close conclusion. Before opening the floor up to any other business, I have a personal remark, which is a special tribute to those I've worked with in previous years. I'm thinking of Wilfred, Patrick, and Isabel. I'm not going to deliver a lengthy speech. We'll do that in a more intimate circle. In keeping with what Ralph already said at his introduction, all three have delivered a substantial contribution to this bank. In all cases, the bank is now doing considerably better than when they joined. Let's hear a round of applause for Wilfred, Isabel. [Foreign language] I am going to open up the floor for remarks. Or rather, excuse me, I will give the opportunity for any other business, and after that, I will have some concluding matters before we head for drinks. Hi there. I was there first. Excuse me, that is how the cookie crumbles. You see how I chair this meeting. Perhaps you should see an eye doctor. I have the following to share. It turns out that we have a lot of carbon dioxide gurus who keep interrupting every meeting I attend all over the country, not only at ING, but elsewhere, too. They propagate their faith about global warming. They disappear after the meeting is over. They are so committed that they vanish. They leave the auditorium and then return, and then leave again. I propose that in the future, we cover these topics at the end of the meeting, and that way we will be finished faster. What was your name for the minutes? It does not really matter, but my name is Vermolen. Mr. Vermolen. Thank you. I am not sure if I am being fair, but I am going to take microphone one now. Please go ahead. I am Mr. Reinen for Mr. Van den Bosch. I support the Willem II team, which did such good things for Mr. Hamers' crew in the 89th minute, so that Roda JC Kerkrade will remain in the honors league. Congratulations on that. On to the substance, which is I asked a question last year, and I have not obtained a satisfactory solution yet. I would like you to do something about that. That was my first remark and request. Next, in the inheritance, I obtained 1 million interest points, and I would like to know what they are worth because I saw them in the annual report, and I estimate that by now there are 1 trillion in interest points in issue with customers, and I have 1 million in what I inherited. I do not know what to do with them. I do not know what they are worth, could you tell me a little more about that? I will leave it at that. As for those interest points, they are worth something if you want to make a purchase in our interest points shop. If you do not want to make any purchases in our interest points shop, they are worthless and they are non-transferable. That is why they are not on a balance sheet, because they are not redeemable for cash. You can purchase products in the interest points shop at a lower cost than anywhere else online. The interest points shop is doing big business. There are many purchases of both apparel and non-apparel. I would urge you to check out our interest points shop. If you have negative interest, can I get interest points for that, too? On to microphone two. Please go ahead. Good afternoon. I'm Mr. Kroom from The Hague, and I have a question relating to PSD2 in payment transactions. I didn't hear anything about that. Can you give me an update, especially about the strategy of the executive board on that? Now, just to explain to everybody what PSD2 is. That's PSD2, that's Payment Services Directive 2. That determines the conclusion is that many parties are able to offer payment services with a milder license in the EU, and that's both an opportunity and a threat. For banks, it's an opportunity because it enables banks to offer services that we don't offer yet in many countries. It's also a threat, including ING, because it means that small companies will be able to offer their services to consumers very easily. How are we going to deal with this? At the innovations, I gave three examples of how we deal with it. Payconiq exemplifies what will be possible with PSD2. At Payconiq, we cannot yet easily access the systems of our fellow banks if customers grant permission, but the bank doesn't. That's what we're working on together with other banks in Payconiq to remain ahead of the development of PSD2 in the countries where we're already major operators. We try to offer payment services that discourage competitors from entering those markets. On the markets where we're challengers, of course, we want to reap new clients, and we have Yolt in the UK, and Twyp Cash in Spain, and Payconiq to deliver services, hoping to attract new customers, and we're doing that. It looks well. It's promising for the future. No, I'm in the limelight. Thank you, Mr. van der Veer. Mr. van der Veer, there was someone here in front of the camera. Not the camera, the microphone, but also the camera. He was talking about the carbon dioxide club. Well, I agree with him. This is dominating all the AGMs nowadays. Of course, climate is an important topic. Very important topic. If you can't make money, Mr. Hamers nowadays, I said it just now with the reappointment, I would say that he's more of a CO2 specialist and energy specialist than perhaps an experienced bank man. It's crazy. You do business with a customer, with a company that, first of all, you have to ask, "Do you generate your own energy? How much gas are you consuming? Who are you buying your products from? From Shell, Royal Dutch, Esso, or God knows who? How often do you go to the bathroom a day?" This is crazy and out of proportion. We're attending an AGM of a company of which the financial results are the most important topic. If you don't have financial performance or financial results, you can't work on the climate. My advice is to put it on the agenda's last point after any other business. If they want to talk about it, fine. Then there's something else. You had a comment about the auditor. 99.3% of the shareholders voted in favor of adopting the financial statements of ING. I don't think that that is to be attributed to the auditor. I don't know what the role he played in terms of the audit, the checks, and any changes made. Anyway, I have a comment about the new CFO. Proven track record. The new CFO has been approved with the highest percentage, you have been chosen with the lowest score, 93.2. Now, that's painful. I don't like that. That'll be all. Thank you for your comments. I'm just going to check all the questions first, then I'll see whether there's anybody here at the table that wants to give a specific answer. My name is van Diepen, this is about the annual report. Annual reports are becoming thicker and thicker. Last year, you had an abbreviated version with slides in Dutch. Can't you introduce that again? Thank you. It's a comment. Just a moment. Microphone five. People have been waiting there for a while. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First I have a comment and then a question. Earlier on, I asked two questions, which in my opinion, were not properly answered or were not answered. It was a question about the possibility people have to learn more. I was referring to people with brain damage. Many of these people, Mr. Hammers referred to elderly people, well, that's not correct, because among young people, there are lots of people who don't have this capacity of learning and changing their ways. I'm just going to wait for the minutes to be posted, I hope this point is properly portrayed in the minutes, even though Mr. Hammers hasn't replied properly. I was rather surprised when I listened to the discussion. On the other hand, I was not that surprised because you listen to people's opinion. I think it's rather strange that people want the whole debate on carbon dioxide to be pushed to the end of the agenda. Your successor at Royal Dutch, at an extraordinary meeting, talked about the adjustments in terms of energy in the Netherlands. He said that we all needed to stay put in our houses, not change houses, because that would entail all sorts of costs if we should move. This is something to take into account. Carbon obviously is an important issue, transported carbon, et cetera. I think that this may have not gotten the attention that it deserved. My question now is that I've been working with this device for some while now. KPN has introduced a new device. Maybe the people here in the room are still capable of getting used to the handset that KPN has just put on the market. As soon as these expire, you may want to check out the handset that has been just introduced by KPN. That's my question. Thank you. First of all the questions. Later on, we'll check whether there are any comments. Mrs. Stevens. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Stevens. I am of the Foundation for Legal Protection of Investors. This winter, we wrote to all the companies and asked them to state in their annual report 2016 when the AGM in 2018 would take place. I called the investor relations officer of ING, and I was told that this simply wasn't possible because this had to do with the committees, and this had to do with determining the dividend payout. We thought this was quite an extraordinary response. I had quite an extensive conversation with this gentleman. I thought, I'll just ask that question again under any other business at the annual general meeting. Some people said, "Oh, yeah. The agenda or the date for the AGM in 2018 is posted on the website." Lots of people don't have internet connection, or some people simply can't deal with a keyboard, they can't check. We feel that it's important that this date be mentioned in the annual report. I'd urge you to do this next year because supervisory directors, I'm sure, are filling in their diaries for 2019. It's important that we know the date. Mr. Stevens, it's not entirely clear. Please help me here. What is it exactly that you want? Let's go back a bit. We didn't understand what you were saying. We sent a mail to all listed companies and asking them to publish the date of their AGM in 2018 in their annual report 2016. That's what it boils down to. We will have to discuss this. There's a bit of confusion, after the meeting, we'll be discussing this because we don't really understand what it is that you want. Comment off mic. The interpreters can't hear. We can't include this date because we haven't agreed on the date yet. You can do that. Okay, we're taking your comments on board. We will think about it, this is it for now. Then we have another question about the annual report, that it's no longer being sent to people's home addresses for environmental reasons. We're wondering, who's fooling who? You guys say you can print out your annual report yourself. I talked to someone this week who was doing that, and he was saying that his printer was smoking. Picking it up in Amsterdam. Well, my foundation can't do that because we have very tight budgets, we're not going to do things that are not entirely necessary. If we have to print out all these annual reports, we'd have to bring in a container in March to the home of Mr. Stevens, that will also mean that the fees will become so much higher. Then you might decide not to allow us to the meeting because we're too contaminating. We would request you to send us your annual report. Well, ING wants climate neutral customers, we don't want your printer to expel all this smoke. Thank you. Microphone number 5. Why don't you move to microphone 2? First of all, the person who's standing at microphone 5. "My name is Elke Budding." Hello. "My name is Mushy. Thank you to Mr. Van der Veer. This is the second time I'm attending this meeting, I hope that the football players of Feyenoord and the supervisory directors will learn a lot from Mr. Balkenende. Thank you." No, number 5. "My name is Buddy. I'm from Heerhugowaard. I am individual shareholder. I wanted to ask you, there are lots of people losing their jobs in Belgium, their severance pay was excellent. People of the age of 55 are getting 80% of their salary up to their pensionable date. Well, I think you could just as well kept these people on your payroll, or is it that they were doing so little that you wanted them to leave? Second, I wish ING would defend the interests of people who have savings accounts. I don't think there's an association to defend the interests of people who save money on their savings account. In any case, these associations are not making a great deal of publicity. The ECB is really damaging all these people who are saving their money because they're manipulating the interest rates. I think Mr. Draghi is visiting the Netherlands on Wednesday. As far as I'm concerned, he should be arrested and remanded in custody. No, but I would want ING to keep an eye on the interests of people who save money in their savings account. EUR 440 billion is your budgetary debt, if you have to pay interest on that would be EUR 22 billion. I would say, it would be in the interest of the state." "4 million new customers," said Mr. Hamers last year. Is that the balance? Otherwise, I would like to ask how many customers left the ING. Okay, let's hurry up, otherwise we'll never have a drink. Microphone 6, you will have the last word. Please be brief. "Mr. Chairman, thank you. My name is Ahmed van Essen, I'm glad you gave me the floor, I'm glad to see people here in the room. I've seen lots of people leave the meeting room. I would like to talk about the risks the bank has, the risk" I'm sorry. I'm going to read it out because I forgot what I was going to say. "Since 2009, ING increased the surcharge on the Euribor rate. Where the Euribor interest is negative, the surcharge increased in excess of the level of the long-term mortgage interest. This surcharge rate, based on all sorts of difficult-to-understand reasons, will probably lead to very good business model for ING and will be interesting to shareholders. My question is, how long do you think you can maintain this business model as ING? This policy that you've pursued since 2009, the policy of unclear surcharges, could it lead to a claim on the part of customers who would want to reclaim the money that they paid in excess of what they should have paid? What will the impact be for shareholders, and is there reason for you to take a provision in your balance sheet? Have you already done so, or is the risk of a claim negligible? Those are my questions. Mr. Chairman, my name is Heini Mann. I'm an individual shareholder, and I reside in The Hague. Mr. Chairman, you just made a promise, but I seriously doubt whether you'll be able to keep that promise, because in a year's time, you will no longer be Chairman of the Supervisory Board. You were going to do something about the fine of EUR 1.3 billion that was imposed by Neelie Kroes, wrongly so, and the fine was because ING was helped. What if a patient goes to a hospital and he's helped there? Should he pay a fine as well? By the way, ING ended up in this situation because it wanted to have access to the American market, and one of the requirement was that ING then should adjust to the practices in the U.S. market, and there was no regulation, no legal regulatory authority. So ING ended up in this situation just as Pontius Pilatus and Pilate. ING, at the time, protested vehemently, and I know that the ING turned to the European Court of Justice, started proceedings, and the ECJ ruled in its favor. Would you believe it? The EU doesn't repay ING. I said in Brussels, someone said, if ING would insist and would continue legal proceedings and be a nuisance, Brussels would continue to litigate until ING was broke. I think it's going to be very difficult for you to keep your promise, you or your successor. Just to be clear, it's a very complicated situation. I can explain it to you. The essence indeed is that fines have been imposed on ING, and halfway this procedure, the matter was settled. Settled meaning that both parties We're in a win-win situation, and it was agreed at the time, and this was also announced at the time of the settlement, that the appeals procedure would continue. The reason being that for the future, so this was outside the settlement of ING, but people wanted to know for the future how to deal with these situations. It was part and parcel of the settlement that the appeals procedure was going to take place. I can go on and on about this, but it's water under the bridge. I didn't promise to recover the EUR 1.3 billion. The comment was that Mr. Balkenende should do his best to do that, I said that that was an excellent idea. You're going to do something about it? I hope so, in any case. Mr. Van der Fine. I'll give the floor to Mr. Hamers to respond to a number of questions that you have just raised. Thank you. Just a couple of points. About the annual report, well, there was hardly any demand for the summary of the annual report, and it was hardly downloaded, this year we didn't produce it. If there's so little demand for such a document, we're not going to invest that much time into it. The annual report is available, and all the information can be obtained in downloading the annual report. Well, in principle, it's up to you. We provide it electronically. You can read it on your screen. I beg your pardon. If you prefer to read it on paper, you could perhaps print only those pages that you're interested in because you don't want smoke to come out of your printer. Indeed. We really want to insist on this policy that the annual report can be downloaded by you. We provide it to you directly. You can simply download it from the site. Number of new customers. I was referring to 4 million new customers over the past four year. It was 1.4 million new customers this past year, and this is a net number of new customers. That means the number of customers that joined minus the number of customers that left ING, that is the number of 1.4 million. Redundancy of employees in Belgium. Well, the way you put it is very straightforward, but it's not that straightforward. Once again, this is about ING employees that have worked for ING for a long period of time. Employees of ING that haven't spent that much time with ING do not qualify for such a severance pay. This is what we offer the ING employees in Belgium, and it's up to them to decide to accept the offer or not. We believe that we've consulted the parties appropriately. It's not been easy, but they've been very constructive in a transformation of this size that we are carrying out in Belgium. We're very grateful for all the support we've been given in this process. The surcharges and the mortgage interest, and particularly in the areas in which we charge Euribor in mortgages. Since the crisis, there are a number of additional surcharges because there are certain costs that we incur in providing mortgages. There are liquidity surcharges, and depending on whether or not you've taken a new mortgage at ING, the risk surcharge for loan-to-value may have changed. There are different surcharges that may be applied also to valuate and to price the risk profile. We do this in all reasonability and in view of the number of mortgages that we enter into. It's not unreasonable, and it still is extremely competitive. I think that this Mr. Chairman. Mr. Hermus. This afternoon, you started your presentation, which you talked about strategy. You said simple and transparent. I know that many customers of ING since 2009 have problems with the surcharge of the Euribor interest and the word transparent doesn't apply here. If as a customer, you've been trying since 2009 to get some more clarity, and you get the answer that you're getting here, it's not simple, nor is it transparent. I hope that after this meeting, you will provide transparency. Thank you. I think that we can wrap up. Thank you on behalf of the executive board for your loyalty to ING, for coming to the meeting, your critical questions, because that keeps us on our toes. We're very pleased. Very much appreciate that. Thank you very much for taking the trouble to prepare properly for all your questions. Much appreciated. Are you done? I am now closing the meeting. We have drinks served outside. Please hand in your voting cards and your handsets. Thank you very much for your questions. Have a safe trip home.

Data Source: Quartr Last updated: May 8, 2017

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