FST Media Staff: What are the top three IT priorities for ING Investment Management (ING) this year?


Posney: Our number one priority in Asia is to further develop our core infrastructure. As we move towards a more global model for ING Investment Management, our core infrastructure must be able to support our users. Our number two priority is to create a platform capable of hosting regional applications more effectively, as creating the capacity to host shared applications better is critical in creating a responsive organisation. The third priority is to leverage global and regional capacity, systems and expertise to reduce the per-unit cost of computing. With an already low-cost model in Asia, gaining scale is a key requirement to further improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of our technology investment.


FST Media Staff: What are the key challenges facing IT investments in wealth management when the economic outlook is still mixed?


Posney: 2008/2009 saw a marked slowdown in IT investment across the industry and many companies put projects on hold. In 2010, in the midst of improving business prospects, there is an overhang of deferred investment to compete with new business initiatives. Coupled with the reduction in headcount/capacity that 2008/2009 brought, companies are facing real capacity issues in terms of budget, staff and organisational change to complete the competing potential projects.


FST Media Staff: What are some of the emerging IT trends you’re keeping an eye on right now; and how do you see these evolving over the next 12 to 18 months?


Posney: The main trend for us to look at right now is cloud computing and software-as-a-service. With an investment climate wary of substantial capital commitment and caution about business growth potential, the opportunity to use suppliers to assist in managing investment risk is very tempting. When coupled with the ability to vary capacity almost on demand, we see a huge potential for these sorts of models going forwards.


In 2009, we moved to the Bloomberg AIMS order management system system, partly because it enabled us to use the expertise of Bloomberg for planning system requirements. Bloomberg is, of course, better placed to manage this planning because they can amortise the investment cost across their entire user base, rather than for us to do so across a much smaller user base.


Cloud computing is appealing, because the ability to have on-demand capacity increase and decrease, both for incremental user-based growth and the ability handle short-term spikes in usage (e.g., testing of a new system), gives us the flexibility that is not cost-effective for us to build ourselves.


FST Media Staff: In your view, which countries in Asia are taking the lead in implementing business-enabled technologies; and which of these developments do you feel are the most interesting?


Posney: Obviously, the developed markets like Australia and Japan are at the forefront. However, I think the real driver for new technologies will come from the emerging markets. If you look at China and India with their huge potential markets, innovation in service delivery is a must. The infrastructure is not adequate to support traditional distribution and service channels, so new operational models are required. As consumer appetite moves from traditional banking services to more products in the wealth-creation space, distribution of product and client servicing will be the challenge.



FST Media Staff: Can you share with us some of the new IT initiatives ING will be rolling out in the next 12 to 18 months?


Posney: Our rollout in the next 12-18 months is directly driven by our three priorities above. It is more about improved quality, rather than major change in what is deployed.


Our key benchmarks are cost — we seek a very aggressive ROI, quality of service measured through system downtime, and application landscape complexity. We do subscribe to a number of industry surveys and measure our service standards and cost information against those.


FST Media Staff: What are the key challenges that you face in your role of managing ING’s regional IT investment and infrastructure?


Posney: Like most asset management companies, the quantum of spend required to support current and potentially enhanced infrastructure capacity is our biggest challenge.


FST Media Staff: What keeps you motivated in your job – is it the technology or the sector and why?


Posney: The opportunities in the next 18 months, through cloud services, virtualisation and economies of scale, are quite exciting. These are not technology changes as such, but rather our ability to leverage them – this is exciting.


FST Media Staff: In your job, you are surrounded by technology all day. Do you use much technology in your personal time or do you prefer more low-tech pursuits?


Posney: I have always been a gadget freak and in my current role, I am too far removed from technologies. So at home, we have everything – 10 terabytes of storage for our digitised movie collection, web servers, email servers, databases, many operating systems and a completely over-engineered network. It is at home that I can get the technology gadget fix that is often lacking at work. I entered the IT space because I love technology, and the ability to do so much with such modest investment is a continued source of joy. I like to have the time to get it right, to have more than one go at something, and to play with the technologies that I want, rather than those that make a good business case – although my spouse is every bit as difficult to convince as any financial controller. And, as I say in the next question, if you don’t have an ongoing curiosity about technology, you probably don’t belong here.


FST Media Staff: What skill-set do you look for in aspiring IT protégés?


Posney: Passion for some area of technology – unless the person has a deep understanding of the technology, they cannot plan with it, I think this is most important in software development – I have never met a great developer/architect who was not passionate about the technologies they use. There is plenty of time for them to age and lose that edge, but to have never had it is a disaster. The second element is to be energetic; they have to want to improve things as much as possible to make their life easy – if they are happy with mundane repetition, they will never strive to improve it. Finally, they have to have the curiosity to find out why things behave the way they do at a detailed functional level – without that curiosity, they will never dive deep enough to build the necessary understanding – be it business processes or hardware design.


FST Media Staff: Every IT leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours?


Posney: This has changed over the years – when I started in the development area, it was to do something, if not great, at least really good. Later, it became building a great development team who could do really wonderful things and more recently, a desire to just make it work properly and be seen to do so – to spend more time getting it right and less just getting it done. The luxury of doing things perfectly, the way they should be done, is increasingly rare and precious.