Yeah. Morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to welcome Steven with us today, CEO of ING. Welcome. A quick bit of sense sitting here. Two years ago at the Capital Markets Day, you told us to expect 14% returns by 2027. Last January, you came back and said, Actually, make it 15%, and then 16% during Q2. So, record income for a third straight year. Buyback programs so regular you could set a watch by it. The obvious questions for the next 40 minutes in this room is now to ask what's left in the tank. Thank you for joining us. I have more questions than the time we have, so let's start to be efficient about it. Thank you so much for joining us again this year.
Thanks.
So maybe just a quick, just to start into it smoothly on the budget day was last week, and the striking thing for this room is that there wasn't anything in that. No bank levy increase, corporate rates untouched, with the burden landing on householder instead. Given the political mood across Europe, on banks' profits, how durable do you think that restraint is from the Dutch government coalition? How is the Dutch fiscal as something you actively provision for, something you simply say it will stay at that?
Yeah. Look, like you rightly point out, it is a minority coalition. Last week, Tuesday, there was the budget day debate, and now that minority coalition needs to find support for the budget, which then needs to be ratified later this year. So it's still not final. At the same time, it wasn't a budget that is focused on economic growth and stimulating investments in the country. It's also a government that supports the further integration of Europe. The Netherlands is also part of that E6 group that focuses on the integration of Europe and especially banks within Europe. There's also a stimulus of focus on more investments. There was an announcement made on the National Investment Institution, that the government is supporting and financial institutions will support. So I think that's also good.
So in that sense, nothing regarding banks, as you say, and more bank levies. To be honest, we already pay quite serious bank levies in the Netherlands. As a matter of fact, in the Netherlands, we pay bank levies based on our global balance sheet, which of course, I am discussing on a regular basis also with the government. But I think I've been making clear consistently that I think we should change that. But if not, then at least we should avoid increasing that. So far, that has been the case.
Perfect. So let's start then with the big picture, and we'll go through the moving parts next. As I said, you upgraded your ROTE to 16% in 2027, over EUR 26 billion revenues by 2027. So where are you most clearly outperforming the original plan, and when should we expect actually the new strategy updates introducing longer-term targets?
Yeah. Well, look, first of all, we have seen good commercial activity translating in good and higher revenue growth, more scalability on the operations and cost side, and I think disciplined capital management. If you then translate that in terms of what it means compared to Capital Markets Day 2024, our renewed guidance basically means that we are upgrading with 2 percentage points in ROTE from 14% to over 16%, and that comes in three areas. First of all, on the revenue side. Our revenue is growing with an additional EUR 1 billion compared to what we said two years ago. That comes from more activity in lending and deposits. Our growth in primary customers continues to be at 1 million per annum, which is also what we then said, and we continue to track at that.
We also then see that both in terms of NII deposits, not only the margin increase, but also the deposit growth that we have been having over the past two and a half years. We have been growing with about EUR 100 billion in deposits. We also see good lending growth coming through. Year-to-date lending growth annualized was about 8%. That's one element of that additional growth. The second element of the growth is the fee growth, whereby we said back then that we would grow with about 5% to 10% to get to a fee of about EUR 5 billion for 2027. We already reached that number by this year. The fee growth has increased with an additional EUR 300 million to EUR 500 million for the year thereafter in 2027. That's the revenue element of it. The second element is the cost element.
Despite that additional activity, I spoke about 1 million primary customers per annum, but you also see that 8% growth in lending, and you see about 7% growth in deposits. You see about 100,000 to 250,000 additional investment customers coming through every quarter. We do more insurer distribution. There's many levers that we pull to actually grow and develop, hence growing the difference. We want to make more revenues with our customers. We have a lot of upside, doing much more with our customers in all four segments that we currently do. But you see that despite that increase in volume that we have across the bank, that we're able to use the scalability, increasingly use the scalability of our operations with all the hubs, and sitting in certain centers doing KYC or contact center activities or operational processing activities.
Increasingly also with our functional technology, which is our cloud environment. All these elements support the scalability of our operations. Still a long way to go, but that also therefore helps, despite the faster growth and keeping the costs under control. It means that what we then said is that our costs will grow at 3% to 4%, to about EUR 13.3 billion in costs as per end of 2027. We now will hover around EUR 13 billion. We are coming out with about a EUR 300 million lower cost guidance than we initially did. A third element of it, why we increased the ROTE with 2 percentage points, is our capital discipline. Despite the strong growth, and you also saw it in the presentation on the second quarter figures, despite a strong growth in lending, our capital growth has been limited, especially due to wholesale banking.
We started with SRTs, Significant Risk Transfer, as of last year. We only could start with that last year because we had to do a lot of remodeling to make our models built, or the models in line with the requirements of the European Central Bank. By last year, and also continuing this year, we have been finalizing those models. It also means that with those new models in place, we can also therefore do risk transfers, which we started to do last year. Last year, we did about 12 basis points. This year, we will do 15 basis points to 20 basis points. We already did, this year- to- date, 4 basis points, so additional 11 basis points to 15 basis points to go. It basically means that we are tilting the risk-weighted assets composition of the bank more towards retail, towards the higher- end of the return on equity spectrum.
Back then, in 2024, I said that it would be around 45%. Then it was 50%/50%. By end of 2027, we would end up 55% retail and 45% wholesale banking in anticipation of the capital diet, as I announced it back then. We are now already at 56%/44%, so therefore we are already there, or even a bit beyond where I thought we would end up. There is more to come. So that's a third reason why the ROTE has been going up. So good on all fronts, both the revenue, the cost, in terms of the scalability of it, and the capital discipline.
Very clear, very detailed answer. Let's now dig into how actually much upside on all these three levers. First of all, on the retail lending. Your retail lending significantly was, pretty much, higher than your 5% target, almost entirely on mortgages. How much of this is actually driven by market share gain versus just a favorable housing market in Netherlands mainly?
Well, clearly, when we started with ING Direct 20 years ago, 25 years ago, we rolled out, let's say that Postbank or ING Netherlands are in many other countries, and we started as a deposit bank and a mortgage bank in many of these markets, purely on the PI front. In Spain, Italy, and Germany, and Australia, and growing further in Poland, and Romania, and Türkiye. So we have nine retail markets where we do deposits. We have now about EUR 380 billion in sorry, not where we do private individual banking. We have about EUR 380 billion in mortgages so far. So we are one of the biggest, if not the biggest mortgage lender in Europe. We do that typically very digitally. So we provide very good experience to our customers to make it very easy to do that.
We also use AI for that in a number of instances, especially with the, let's say, the happy flow mortgages. Some markets, not even GenAI, we get the mortgages within 30 minutes. From requirement to approval in 30 minutes. For the more bespoke ones, we now are increasing also using Agentic AI, such as in the Netherlands, where we bring back the time that we need to process mortgages from seven days to five days, but those are mortgages whereby there's more information needed, but you can see how quickly then we can bring back the number of days. That also helps us in growing, but not only because the market is growing, because the market is indeed growing because there is a shortage of housing in many countries in Europe. For us, that is helpful, how we can help customers to buy a home.
Yeah.
That's why you see the mortgage market grow in a number of markets. We do that, by the way, we focus mainly on those markets to grow where we can also get the adequate returns. That's why you also have seen that we especially grow in the Netherlands, attractive. Germany, attractive. Italy, attractive, and Australia. Those are the more attractive mortgage markets. But we've also been taking market share. Let me give you an example. In the Netherlands, our market share is around 14%, but if you look at the last, I would say, two years, every quarter, we have a production market share compared to the bank book. Bank book is 14%. Market share and production is about 18%-19%. There you see we're also taking market share.
Very good. Now, in terms of margin for this market share take-up, the margin's been stable, lending margin to us, the margin is stable for the last few quarters, and then it compressed a bit in Q2 by 2 basis points.
Okay.
How do you see the competition dynamics there in terms of pricing, or how expensive has been this market share gain for you?
Well, the lending margin, which now indeed came in, I think, from 126 basis points or to 124 basis points, as you rightly point out. But the margin is also a function of, let's say, the risk weights that we have as a bank, and we have relatively low risk weights as a bank, and we do a lot of mortgages. We do a lot of collateralized lending and wholesale banking, and that means that we have low risk-weighted lending, and that low risk-weighted lending also typically comes with lower NIM. But we don't steer on NIM per se. We steer on return on equity. That's the main driver that we steer. If you have lower risk weights with a lower margin, you can still have a very attractive return on equity, which is what even these mortgages in these countries prove.
We think there ahead, if you look at the main macro driver, a shortage in housing will continue in many markets in Europe. We continue to be a strong bank. We really focus on there where we can make the right ROE. That is across the businesses. So across private individuals, business banking, private banking, and wholesale banking. It's not so much of the margin pressure in the market, but much more about the composition of the book that led to a decrease in that margin. And I think that we'll be seeing the margin stabilizing over the remainder of the year.
And where do you see the most, if I can call it so, competition? Is it on the Dutch, German mortgage or business banking?
Business banking, not so much. We have been growing, by the way, business banking, there we have a book of about EUR 130 billion. We have been growing that with EUR 7 billion year- to- date, so that's annualized over 10%.
That is also, by the way, because we are developing business banking propositions in other markets than the Benelux and Poland. Currently, that EUR 130 billion book, 95% of that sits in those three markets. Why was that? Because there we were an incumbent bank in those markets, so there we had all the market segments. In most of the other markets, we had only private individuals and wholesale banking, but nothing in between. So that Postbank concept with indirect concept was very PI-focused. But in the meantime, we have built up very good capabilities also in business banking. So we also start to roll out business banking in other markets. We have been doing that now for the past couple of years in Germany. We are starting to do that in Italy. We are going to do that in Spain. We are starting to do it in Australia.
So also that helps to diversify, not only in terms of fees, because I want to do much more in fees to actually have levers, next to my interest, and business. I also want to diversify in terms of type of business. So business banking is also a good growth, in the different markets. So that is why you see the high growth coming in. In terms of the competition, I think that if you especially look at the mortgage markets, we see more competition, especially in Belgium and in Spain in that regard. That is why I said I focus on ROE. So yes, if there is accretive ROE in markets, then we will grow, but we will be careful when there is depletion of ROE, and that sometimes is the case in Belgium and Spain.
Thank you. Very clear. Let us move now to a very, I think, important topic is on the deposits and your, I would say, deposit strategy there. Deposits growth has been very strong in 2025. It was a bit bumpy, driven by deposit campaigns in Belgium, Germany mostly. We all noticed that in first half, that strategy has completely shifted to more micro campaigns.
Yeah.
Which still yielded to a healthy deposit growth. So, I really want to understand here what triggered that shift and how actually you are confident that this change of strategy will still give you that deposit growth and not you have the stop and go in this because you would have maybe to come back to the market with traditional campaigns.
Yeah. Look, when I talked just about, let's say, the Postbank and the rollout of ING Direct in many markets, we started out in most of these markets as a deposit bank and consequently a mortgage bank. We were very simple. We said, We take a digital concept. We are easy, instant, personal relevant. A lot to do still, by the way, on personal relevant, but we are very easy and instant. We start with deposits and mortgages. Why do we do that? We said because in the Netherlands, people like deposits and mortgages. We did not do investments, we didn't do credit cards, because people in the Netherlands use debit cards most of the time, so why would there be a need of credit cards? Not so many investments because, yeah, we are in the Netherlands, we like saving. Let's be conservative about it.
No consumer lending because consumer lending is risky. Why would you borrow from a bank? Moreover, most of your money sits in the pensions in any case. With that same frame of mind, we went to those markets, and that means that we have 25 years plus. Since the end of the '90s, we went to all these markets, that we have 25 years experience in doing digital marketing to get customers in to become a savings client of ours and then greatly convert them to a current account client. We have a lot of experience, and that also means that we know very well when we should do what. Moreover, by the way, now we have over EUR 700 billion in deposits. Over the past two and a half years, our deposits grew with about EUR 100 billion, so we continue to grow.
95% of our deposits, we pay the core rate. What do I mean with that? It means we don't need to do a lot of specials, because we typically pay the core rate on these savings in most of these markets for the lion's share. When we do campaigns, we look very much at the momentum, and then we look at, so is this a good momentum? You can think about Black Friday, or you can think about different seasons in which you say, Well, this is a good time when people want to save money or when they want to come to the market. Of course, then you look at, okay, how do we tailor them then?
Do you focus them on new customers and first get new customers in, or do you want to get new money from existing customers and convert them into primary customers? Primary customers are customers who have a current account with us and want more products. Why is this so important? Because these primary customers typically do three times as more business with us than non-primary customers. Campaigns target different things. Because we now have so much data on our customers, increasingly, we also become better on targeting specific subgroups. We don't need to say, okay, we now do a campaign for everybody who's new or for everybody who sits in ING, but we can say, okay, we target specific subsegments in specific time. We do micro campaigns, and because we have increasingly all that experience over these years, we will continue to alternate.
But again, with that micro campaign that we did in Germany in the second quarter, we got an additional EUR 8 billion in. And of course, we then want to make sure that these customers stay with ING and become primary. That is how we look at it. We have different ways and means to pull different levers, and that is why we are very confident about our deposits ratio also going forward.
I guess you would be back testing this and see how actually that would be enough for your funding. Do you watch your loans deposit metric in jurisdictions and assess how actually the strategy is working, and we do not need to. In Belgium, if you remember, two years ago, you had that kind of a small issue, and you had to go back and pay up on deposits to fix that ratio. Is that something you monitor that closely, or you can let it go?
No. I think you are pointing out to the campaign we did during the Staatsbon, the state bond. I think that was because we saw an opportunity, compared to other banks, to raise deposits and get deposits out from other banks, which actually was very successful. It was not because we had an issue with loan- to- deposits. So I would like to correct that. Now, look, our loan- to- deposits sits at around 100%. It is a level I feel comfortable with. It is also good. It basically means we only need to go to the deposit market to raise money for our loans, which at this point in time is cheaper than go to the wholesale funding market.
There are quarters whereby, and we have seen that especially after Corona and at the start of the war in Ukraine, that you saw a number of quarters, actually a number of years, that deposits rose faster than loans. Now you see that loans are catching up, and they are growing a bit faster than deposits. It will never move exactly in sync, but we are comfortable with that 100%.
Thank you. Moving on to on the other side of the liability side, on the replication portfolio. You are sensitive to high rates. You upgraded the guidance in Q2 partly on the back of that, I suppose, and Q1 as well.
Yeah.
Rates have moved since.
Yeah.
Can you maybe just remind the audience on your sensitivity on replicate portfolio and how much actually upside you see if you embed the current curve in your model?
Yeah. We have 65% approximately of our deposits is savings, and then about 35% is current accounts. The replication on savings is typically a little bit shorter than on current accounts because current accounts are being held longer in banks than savings accounts. That is why it is so important that we are converting customers into primary customers. We start in many of these markets as a savings bank. Because we were new, we were 25 years ago, came in many markets as a, you now call it neobank, but we were, let us say, a neobank [Non-English content] , I would say, two and a half decades ago. Then we start with the savings accounts.
That's why you see in ING, even compared to a number of other banks, that we still relatively have more savings than current accounts, because in most markets, we were not the incumbent bank, but we were the challenger bank.
Yeah.
In that, we have what we call a barbell strategy, and that is we invest in echelons from 1 to 10 years. But if you re-look at it, we invest about 45% shorter than one year and 55% more long-term, hence the barbell expression. On both of those areas, currently, we see where we are reinvesting those short-term echelons and the long-term echelons. Remember, five, six years ago, the interest rates, at least the euro interest rate was negative. So when we are reinvesting those echelons, on both sides of that barbell, that's currently positive. So when we reinvest short-term, that's positive, because the short-term interest has moved up in the past couple of quarters. And the long-term interest rate is better because we come out of that 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 periods. Right? So that works good on all sides.
In the beginning of the year, we said, well, we are going to end up somewhere at the lower- end between 100 basis points and 110 basis points. If you look long-term, we have been hovering our deposit margin between 100 basis points and 110 basis points. When the interest rate went up very quickly, so it is about the speed of the interest rate, because markets are slow to respond to competition, there we saw we broke out of that in 2021, 2022, close to 120 basis points. Then when the interest rate went down very quickly, the market is, of course, again, slow to react. Then we gradually moved down even a little bit below 100 basis points, and now we are back in that 100 basis points- 110 basis points territory.
But now we see steps being made, and we have now set for this year, in the second quarter we gave guidance, that we thought we would end up at the higher- end of between the 105 basis points and 110 basis points, or the 100 basis points- 110 basis points so you could see it's more on the higher- end of that. And we said based on where we currently see the rates that have been announced, based on the current forward curve, based on that, we are confident that we will again break out of that 100 basis points- 110 basis points on the upper side in 2027 and 2028. Again, there's a lot of uncertainty in the market. There's a lot of volatility. But based on where we sit now, we would break out.
It is good. That was my next question, but you answered it, and we are last 30 minutes before talk profitability margins.
Yeah.
It is a record. No, thanks. That was very clear. I will move on now onto the fee growth. You increasingly, in your first question you detailed well where you are in terms of fees. But what are the key drivers for this fee growth you see next? We will discuss the private banking after, which I think is a key lever for you on this.
Yeah.
But can you tell us your ambitions beyond the current targets? Not numerically, but more in terms of the vision you have.
Yeah. Again, let me give again back that context. Like I just said, in many markets, we started as a very simple bank focused on savings, deposits, mortgages, and now have greatly started to embark on a broader relationship. ING started many markets out as the other bank, and so you have your main bank, and then we are the other bank, and you put your savings on it, and perhaps you can do a mortgage. And increasingly, we have been starting to do investments. When I started in my role six years ago, the total assets under management were, I think, south of EUR 150 billion. Now we are at EUR 330 billion. Every quarter, like I said, we grow our investment customers with 100,000 to 150,000. So in the year, approximately 400,000 to 500,000 per annum.
Currently, we therefore have 5.3 million customers now investing with ING, but it still means that of the 41 million, have about 36 million of people that are not investing with ING. If you continue to talk about investments, we still have a one- size- fits- all approach. When we came to those markets, we said we want to be easy, instant, personal, and relevant. We are very easy and instant straight through. 82% of our customer journeys is straight through processing, so no manual intervention, only digital, and we are growing that percentage every year. When beneficial for the customer, by the way, not because we just want to be digital. But we are not necessarily personal and relevant. What do I mean with that? I mean with that, you can approach people with the same products, but how you approach people can be different.
That means that if you look at mass or mass affluent or affluent, you should approach them also differently. Look at Germany. We have 500,000 mass affluent customers. Those are customers that invest a couple of hundred thousand euro, and they sometimes need different products or they need different approach or they need different advice. We also see that 90% + of their money that they invest, they do not invest with ING. Why? Because we do not necessarily invest specific products. If we do polls and ask clients, do you know ING? We are probably the most European bank of all the banks. So in many markets, we are a well-known bank or a top five bank in many of the markets which we operate. But if you then ask our clients, do you know you can invest with ING? The percentage drops dramatically. Why?
Because in many markets, we did not start as a bank to invest with. So what I am saying is, there is a world to win, and we are doing very well now in growing that. But to becoming more personal and relevant and specific, and it means that we can grow that in many more ways. In that setting also, we did have, in those non-retail markets, nine investment platform. We all build those banks separately. Now we are integrating that investment platform into one investment platform. By which we also become a better partner for asset managers. We can say you have a private credit segment, and a private equity segment, and an ETF segment, and a real estate segment. Then we now choose global partners so we can make our offerings much better.
We also work much better together with these asset management partners as to how do we market these funds together. So that gives a lot of upside. The same story I can tell you for insurance distribution. When I started six years ago and I asked my Head of Retail in the board, I said, okay. Can I talk to insurance experts in ING? Because in the past we used to own an insurance company. She said, do not worry, Steven. After we sold the insurance company in 2014, we made sure we had absolutely zero insurance knowledge in the bank left. I said, oh, but that is not what I meant. I said, can I speak with experts so we can do better insurance distribution? Then we started to develop that.
We started with new contracts with different players, improved journeys to make the journeys better because they were a bit clunky, have different type of propositions. Only two years ago, we started to develop also propositions for business banking. We did not have that. Now we have insurance propositions starting for segments of business banking. Credit cards. Remember, in the Netherlands, we do not use credit cards, we use debit cards. Only in Germany, as of November this year, we will have a credit card offering because we did not need a credit card offering because the Dutch, he thought, no, they all use debit cards in different markets. Now we are going to also roll out the credit cards in all the markets, and so forth and so forth. We also have package offerings. We had one package same for all clients.
We now have four different packages that we are rolling out in all these markets. What I am telling you is a story about there is much more diversification and bespoke offerings we can do for the private individual market, but the same goes for business banking, and I am sure you also want to talk about private banking.
Private banking. I think you have touched on this as well and so on, but because of being aware of time, I would maybe move to the wholesale bank, which is still a big part of your business.
Yeah.
What do you think really the realistic ROE for this business? Your plan is still trailing below your group ROEs. We can say it is dragging a bit profitability down. This using tools like SRT, as you said earlier, with step up in SRT and so on. I ask you this question all the time, Steven. You know where I am coming from here. Is it really time to be a bit more forceful about this segment and maybe go into Restructuring is a big word, given. Just to look more in depth into the divisions and business and what actually you are right to do and not.
Yeah. Well, first of all, I very much believe in the concept of universal banks, because if you are a universal bank in a market, hence why we are also filling the blanks in business banking and private banking, because then in Germany we are, and Spain also, and Italy also, BI and wholesale, but not yet business banking. No self-employed, no SME, no mid corporates, no private banking. The virtuous circle or cycle of being able to help clients through their lifetime in different phases but also in different types of businesses, is helpful. You see that because the Netherlands, for example, but also Poland are very remunerative, but those are universal banks. So I believe very much in that concept.
Still, and you are very right, then your question is, okay, but do you think that the return in wholesale banking is where it should be? My answer is no. We have said in wholesale banking we need to do a couple of things. First of all, like with retail, and retail in all the segments, BI, business banking, private banking, we also there need to diversify further. There we came from an area where we were largely a lending bank. It came from, in the past, Barings Bank, BBL, which were the predecessor of ING. We had a great deposit bank, and they moved the deposit to the wholesale bank, and we became a lending bank. Also there, we need to diversify further into financial markets and mainly transaction services. PCM is very good and new to the product to have.
We are deep with capabilities in some markets. We are not so deep in other markets. Diversification in wholesale banking is the first lever that we need to pull. The second lever, to your point, that we need to pull is better capital management. That is why I said two and a half years ago that we put wholesale banking on a capital diet. We have said that the first step is to get wholesale banking to a return exit to 12% in 2027. I think we are now at around 11%. But, and we will meet the 12% by 2027. I am very confident on that, but it is still not enough.
Therefore, I will continue the capital diet for wholesale banking until they get to a level that is more linked to where I want it to be. That means that we will continue to see that the balance of capital will continue to shift to retail vis-à-vis wholesale.
Thank you. Very clear. Let's move around costs. Given your DNA with ING Direct and your first in digital, I remember first time I heard about cloud was when you actually moved to investment a lot, many, many years ago.
Yeah.
Where do you see actually the investments versus to fund the growth equilibrium is? Because you clearly look optimistic about growth capabilities to capture profitable growth, but you need investment for this. Where should we see the growth? Maybe there will be a quick follow-up and we can address at the same time on AI and where you're positioned there.
Yeah. First of all, our story is a growth story. We are not a cost story. We are focusing on growth because, like I said, we can do much more with the customers that we have. On the BI side, the 41 million customers, and with the 2 million business banking customers where we have not rolled it out in all the markets where we're active, and private banking, which we also had only in three of the nine markets in which we're active, we can now roll out these building blocks in other markets as well. The same goes for wholesale banking, where we need to focus more on finished markets and mainly TS. Our story therefore is about growth and diversification. Therefore, you see positive jaws because we grow relatively fast compared to other banks in Europe.
But we also want to keep the cost under control, and that actually meant that if you therefore look at the 27 dates, that we are able to take EUR 300 million out of that, and thereby our cost CAGR was about 3%. We want to continue to be disciplined. Increasingly, we can become more scalable on the operational side with the hubs. On the technology side, functionally speaking, we are getting there because we are, like you said, one cloud environment. We have one engineering pipeline, which means that when engineers code something, they can code it one time for multiple countries, where in the past that was not possible. But the next step is that we are becoming more scalable in the products that we issue. Currently, retail products are still, because of the history of ING Direct, were really tailored market by market.
Now we get to the stage that, for example, when we roll out investments, we can do it on one platform, on one technology stack. When we look at one app, one web environment, we can really make it one app and one web for all the markets. When we look at business banking, we start to experiment with rolling it out in different markets on one of our tech stacks in one of the markets that we already have. You will see increasingly scalability coming through. It means that will help in funding the investment that we have. Coming to AI, look, I think that we were a digital front-runner, and I think that's the way to see what a digital front-runner also means on the AI area. I would look at a couple of things.
First of all, I would look at, do you have a technology and data platform that can substantiate that? That's why I talked about our internal cloud environment. Two, what is your approach to AI and especially to agentic or GenAI? We have gone for a very centralized approach with clear use cases that we say, this is what we want everybody to do so that you really can focus on the big wins. Three, the question is, [can you attract the talents then, Omar?]. We have 600 people working in AI, with 300 in a hub in Türkiye and a few other hubs. It means that we have very good digital talent that we can feed the bank with, who can build those use cases for us. The fourth one is, do you have a good partner?
We use a number of partners, but the main partner is Google, where we use VISTA. That is actually a data layer whereby we can then use all of our models to develop use cases both for processing and client interaction. For coding, we do it separately. If you look at the use cases, that's number five. We were the first bank to roll out agentic mortgages in the Netherlands, Europe. In the Netherlands, we did that. Now we are going to roll it out in other markets as well. We're going to start to roll out conversational banking with AI. In terms of our chatbot, 75%. A couple of years ago, 45% of the traffic was routed away through AI. Now with GenAI, it's going to be 75%.
There you see that we have a lot of use cases we can really use in real life, not only to save cost, but also to improve the customer experience because we want these customers to do more with us.
Perfect. We have less than one minute. Just very quickly, just almost to tick the box here in terms of your M&A strategy. I have to ask this question. You have been very clear. It is organic, it is primary clients. I think that is going to be clear. Can you just tell us where you stand today in terms of accelerating this with non-organic?
23 seconds. We have very good organic growth. That is the primary focus. We do this very well. We grow this year, things with 5%-10%, balances with 8%, fees with over 10%. We are very good. Then I would say bolt-on, but especially in skill sets that we do not have. Let us take an example. We took a 40% stake in Singular. That is a private bank in Spain. Because we did not have the branding positioning in that market, nor we do not have the private banking skill sets because we do not have private bankers. If we can then accelerate growth, and we have a cool option, by the way, to also buy the remainder. But first, it is about understanding private banking and collaborating better. Or we took an asset manager in Poland, so add-ons with things that we do not have.
Opportunistically, we can always look at other things. But that is opportunistic. Main focus, organic, and then bolt-ons. When I become opportunistic, I will tell you.
Thank you very much, Steven. Thank you.
Thank you.