ING publishes 2023 Annual Report

ING publishes 2023 Annual Report

ING today published its 2023 Annual Report, giving stakeholders an insight into our strategy, business activities and performance over the past year. Our activities are presented in the context of our strategic priorities: providing a superior customer experience and putting sustainability at the heart of what we do.

“It is fair to say that 2023 was a challenging year on many counts: geopolitical and economic shocks, supply-chain disruptions, inflationary pressures, climate-related and other natural disasters, wars, and the continuing trend of societal and political fragmentation across the globe. Against this backdrop, we are proud that we were able to navigate these conditions successfully, make good progress on our strategy, and deliver a set of strong financial results,” said CEO Steven van Rijswijk and chairman Karl Guha in their message to shareholders, clients, colleagues, and other stakeholders.

The report includes further enhanced disclosures around our climate ambition and our efforts to support customers in their sustainable transitions. Also, we included a dedicated ESG section ahead of the introduction of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive that will be mandatory starting in 2025. During the past year, we further sharpened a number of policies, including restricting financing of mining and use of coal for steel making and on the gradual phasing out of financing upstream oil and gas activities towards 2040. We worked with industry experts and others to create a financing framework for the aluminium industry, in line with earlier established standards for steel and shipping. In addition, we announced our aim to to triple our financing of renewable energy to €7.5 billion per annum by 2025, up from our target set in 2022 of €2.5 billion.

We also report on the four areas enabling us to execute our strategy: providing a seamless digital experience, using our scalable tech and ops, staying safe and secure and unlocking our people’s full potential. On the latter, the report highlights our commitment to diversity, inclusion and belonging, including an analysis of ING’s gender pay gap. While we made progress by increasing the representation of women in senior management positions from 29% to 31%, we realise there is still more to be done, especially about the under-representation of women in leadership positions, which will also help address the existing gender pay gap.