ING Groep N.V. American Depositary Shares Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Good morning. This is Laura welcoming you to ING's 2Q 2026 conference call. Before handing this conference call over to Steven van Rijswijk, Chief Executive Officer of ING Groep, let me first say that today's comments may include forward-looking statements, such as statements regarding future developments in our business, expectation for our future financial performance, and any statement not involving a historical fact. Actual results may differ materially from those projected in any forward-looking statement. A discussion of factors that may cause actual results to differ from those in any forward-looking statement is contained in our public filings, including our most recent annual report on Form 20-F, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and our earnings press release, as posted on our website today. Nothing in today's comments constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities. Good morning, Steven. Over to you.

Thank you very much. Good morning and welcome to our results call for the second quarter of 2026. Thank you for joining us today. I hope that you're all doing well. I'm joined by our CFO, Ida Lerner, and by our new CRO, Andrea Cesaroni. Through our Growing the Difference strategy, we have accelerated growth in both our customer base and customer balances. Our excellent second quarter results demonstrate that this commercial performance is translating into improved operating leverage and sustainable earnings growth. Today, I will discuss the drivers behind these results, the value we continue to create through the consistent execution of our strategy, and how our strong progress so far this year has enabled us to further upgrade our outlook for 2026 and 2027.

After that, Ida will walk you through the quarterly financials. At the end of the call, we will be happy to take your questions. With that, let's start with slide two. We are pleased by the continued strong customer activity that we see across the franchise, as well as by the clear upward momentum in our profitability. What is particularly encouraging is that these are not separate developments, they are part of the same growth strategy. We continue to attract more customers. More customers choose us as their primary bank, allowing us to deepen the relationships with more products and higher volumes. We increasingly do so through a scalable operating model. This translates into further income growth and diversification, positive operating jaws, and higher profitability.

This self-reinforcing cycle is the core engine of our strategy and allows us to grow our business, generate capital, and offer attractive shareholder returns all at the same time. In looking at the second quarter, we've added 377,000 mobile primary customers, bringing our growth in the last 12 months to over 1 million, ahead of the target set at our Capital Markets Day in June 2024. Let me remind you that mobile primary customer growth is not just about acquiring new customers. Mobile primary customer growth indicates that we are deepening the role that ING plays in their financial lives. This is economically important and a fundamental strength of the ING brand, because primary relationships are the foundation for deeper engagement, more cross-selling, increasing balances, and ultimately higher income generation per customer. This is what we clearly see reflected here on this slide as well.

Loan growth was again strong at an annualized pace of more than 8% with continued demand from customers across our markets. We also saw strong inflow of deposits from our customers at an annualized pace of 8.5%, supported by successful deposit gathering campaigns aimed at both existing and new-to-bank customers. Fee income, that grew by 14% year-on-year, benefiting from our growing customer base and from increased customer engagement, both in retail banking and in wholesale banking. Finally, our sustainable volume mobilized has increased 28% in the first half of 2026 as we remain committed to supporting our clients in their sustainable transitions. Overall, this continued momentum in customer activity has translated into income growth of more than 5% over the past 12 months, while headcount was reduced by more than 1%. Cost growth remained well contained at around 2%.

These positive operating jaws of more than 3 percentage points clearly demonstrate how we are increasingly enabling scalable growth. As a result of that, the ROTE, the return on tangible equity, reached 17% in the second quarter, while our four-quarter rolling ROTE improved by 1.5 percentage points year-on-year. Let me move to the next slide, where we will take a closer look at how we are progressing against some of these strategic priorities. We move to slide three, and this slide shows how we have doubled our growth since launching our Growing the Difference strategy, starting at the Capital Markets Day mid-2024. Besides clearly illustrating the accelerated growth in customer balances, we see even stronger growth in income diversification. First, turning to the loan book.

As a leading European mortgage bank, we continue helping people financing their homes, and this has been a strong driver for overall lending growth, which is furthermore supported by diversified growth across business banking, consumer lending, and wholesale banking. We're growing the book where we see attractive risk-adjusted opportunities while remaining disciplined on capital consumption. This allows us to support our customers, capture profitable organic growth, and generate attractive return. Our deposit franchise remains a fundamental strength and cornerstone of ING. Our deposit book is large, it's highly granular, predominantly insured, and ever-growing. It provides stable and diversified funding, while the combination of accelerated growth in deposits and strong net inflows and assets under management clearly shows that we are capturing a larger share of our customers' overall financial assets.

This interplay of franchise strength, customer loyalty, and continued growth provides a strong foundation for continued earnings expansion. I already mentioned the strong net inflows and assets under management and our success in investment products is a key contributor to accelerated growth in overall fee income as well. In fee income, we see improved momentum across all our businesses, benefiting from a growing customer base, broadening of the product offerings, and from increased customer activity across both retail and wholesale. In short, our strategy is delivering accelerated and value-accretive growth across our franchise. With that, we move to slide four. Now on the previous slide, that was slide three, you have seen how our growth strategy has successfully translated into results.

This slide four, there we highlight a few examples of consistent strategy execution across our business segments, which will further drive commercial growth in the future. In private individuals, start with that first, we focus on accelerating growth by increasing impact and value for our customers. For example, through Agentic Mortgages, which is already live in production. Agentic Mortgages are a prime example of how our AI capabilities allow us to achieve true scalable growth. We use AI to significantly reduce the time to yes, so time to approval, and we service a greater number of customers without adding additional FTEs. On the commercial side, we are rolling out a new global subscriptions model designed to make daily banking easier and to deliver greater value for customers.

This move marks an important step in Australia to evolve from a product-based banking towards more relationship-based propositions, combining banking, protection, lifestyle benefits within one single offering. Soon we will start to roll out conversational banking in our mobile app, which is a personal assistant with Agentic AI capabilities, providing a significantly enhanced digital experience to our customers. In summary, we continue to make banking simple and frictionless for our customers on the one hand, on the other hand, delivering increasing value and impact in accelerating our growth. Building scale in more market segments and playing a bigger role in the overall economy was another key theme of our strategy. In business banking, talking about building scale, we are deploying our high return model in other countries as well.

We have launched Germany and Italy business banking, early next year we will be launching in Spain. We are also increasingly adding new capabilities to our offering, and over the past six months, we have seen a doubling of our net customer growth. Private banking. We are building a third retail pillar based on the strong synergies with our other business segments. We've launched our private banking proposition in Italy, providing tailored wealth management, investment strategies, and financial planning with a mix of digital tools and personal advisors. We will soon follow a similar approach in Spain, where in addition, we have acquired a stake of approximately 40% in a leading Spanish wealth manager, Singular Bank, and Singular will continue to operate as an independent entity in the Spanish private banking market with a product offering that is complementary to that of ING.

Together with Singular's management team, we will work on further commercial cooperation in identified opportunities for growth. If we look ahead, private banking will be a key contributor to overall income diversification and is therefore very encouraging to see that a 30% year-on-year fee income growth was achieved in this segment. Wholesale banking. There we've made strong progress in diversifying our income and increasing capital velocity. Wholesale banking fees income keeps increasing quarter-over-quarter and is now 11% ahead of the prior year, supported by a wide range of products and services. Furthermore, our focus on attracting customer deposits is paying off with a CAGR of almost 10% in the last two years. We stay with wholesale banking a little bit. Let's move to slide five, and there I will zoom in on the progress we made in capital optimization.

This slide five, shows how our disciplined RWA management accelerates the enhancement of our overall ROTE profile for the group. While our loan book expanded significantly year-on-year, our growth in risk-weighted assets has been limited. The strong performance in RWA management is mainly driven by capital optimization measures in wholesale banking, where RWA consumption came down in absolute terms by EUR 4.6 billion year-on-year, despite growing its lending book and revenues. Wholesale banking has managed down its RWA consumption through the increasing use of secondary loan sales, insurance, and overall client portfolio optimization, as well as through SRTs, including a $1 billion RWA benefit from our first SRT transaction this year.

Again, at our Capital Markets Day in 2024, we announced our expectation to shift the capital allocation between retail and wholesale from 50/50 at that point to 55% for retail banking by the end of 2027. Since then, the combination of accelerated client activity in retail banking and disciplined RWA management in wholesale banking has enabled us to already exceed that target today, 18 months ahead of plan. Going forward, we will continue to optimize capital allocation to further enhance our overall ROTE profile. We go to slide six, and on that slide, we see the financial effect of consistently executing our Growing the difference strategy, our ability to grow our customer base, deepen relationships with customers, and diversify our income, while doing so in a scalable way, is translating into positive operating leverage and higher profitability.

We then deploy the capital we generate efficiently, investing in profitable growth, in selective M&A, and returning structurally excess capital to our shareholders. As a result, we are increasingly converting our profitability growth into higher earnings per share, with EPS increasing by 16% year-on-year. Over the past 12 months, we have delivered EUR 6.7 billion of net profit, equivalent to two percentage points of CET1. Of this EUR 6.7 billion, 50%, five zero percent, has been reserved for our regular dividend distributions. Around 10% has been used to fund profitable growth and around 40%, the remainder, has been allocated to additional distributions, selective M&A, or has been reserved outside of CET1. Overall, this is a strong demonstration of increased capital generation and disciplined capital allocation. As discussed on slide seven, where I will show how this results in highly attractive shareholder returns.

On slide seven, in line with our distribution policy, we have consistently paid cash dividends. We have been executing significant share buyback programs for several years. Together, this results in consistent and attractive total distribution per share. The share buyback program we announced in April is currently underway and is expected to be completed in October this year. Looking ahead, we remain fully committed to strong capital discipline and strong shareholder returns. We maintain our semi-annual rhythm of assessing the potential for additional distributions. We will update you again with our third quarter results. Now before handing over to Ida, let me conclude with slide nine. On slide nine, we show how our strong progress this year has enabled us to further upgrade our outlook for 2026 and 2027. We're well on track to add 1 million mobile primary customers per year.

Our fee income growth is tracking well ahead of plan. We expect to already reach the EUR 5 billion mark in fees this year, one year ahead of our original plan. For 2027, we upgrade our outlook to the range of EUR 5.3 billion to EUR 5.5 billion. On the back of strong momentum both in commercial NII and fee income, we also increase our outlook for total income, where we now expect more than EUR 24.5 billion in 2026 and more than EUR 26 billion in 2027. While client activity and volumes were significantly stronger than previously expected, our operating expenses are tracking well in line with our full year outlook, which is therefore reiterated and which ensures an even stronger operating jaws than previously planned.

Combined with the strong progress that we've made in enhancing our business mix and ROTE profile, we're now upgrading our ROTE outlook by one percentage point for both years. Now expecting an ROTE of more than 15% in 2026 and more than 16% in 2027. Through the consistent execution of our strategy, we are delivering a broad range of catalysts that will continue to support the upward path of our ROTE and EPS in the years to come. I will now hand over to Ida, who will take you through our quarterly results in more detail, starting with slide 11. Ida. Thank you, Steven. It's my pleasure to walk you through the key drivers of our strong performance in the second quarter.

On slide 11, we can see how the sustained growth momentum in commercial NII and fee income drove an increase in total income by 10% year-on-year. Commercial NII is supported by continued volume growth on both sides of the balance sheet, by disciplined commercial pricing, and by the prolonged hedging tailwind on our replication customer deposits. Fee income also continued its upward trend, benefiting from our growing customer base and increased customer activity, up 14% compared to the same quarter last year. All other income recovered from the heightened market volatility that affected the previous quarter and was furthermore supported by stronger trading income in financial markets.

Overall, total income increased 8% quarter on quarter and 10% year on year, driven by stronger customer activity across the franchise. Let's take a closer look at the volume growth, turning to slide 12. Here we show the development of our customer balances. As you can see, we delivered another quarter of strong commercial growth. Net core lending increased by EUR 15.2 billion. Retail Banking grew its loan book by EUR 12.1 billion. Demand for mortgages remained solid, with strong production in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Australia. Business lending also increased alongside growth in consumer lending. Wholesale Banking delivered EUR 3 billion on net core lending growth as client demand for financing remained robust. On the liability side, customers have continued to entrust more of their savings with us, as reflected in the net core deposit growth of EUR 15.9 billion. Retail Banking contributed EUR 16.7 billion.

Supported by successful deposit gathering campaigns, as well as seasonal inflows related to holiday allowance payments. We saw strong net inflows, particularly in Germany and in the Netherlands. Wholesale Banking deposits declined slightly. We continued to see positive momentum from new mandates in our payments and cash pooling business. However, this was offset by outflows from higher volatility deposit balances, particularly in financial markets. Now on to commercial NII on slide 13. Commercial NII grew by EUR 114 million quarter on quarter and was 10.7% higher than last year. Lending NII rose by EUR 16 million quarter on quarter, driven by 8% annualized growth in lending volumes. The lending margin decreased slightly, mainly as a result of growth in lower risk density loans. Liability NII increased by EUR 97 million, supported by higher deposit volumes and a three basis points improvement in the liability margin.

This higher liability margin is a reflection of the prolonged hedging tailwind on our replicated deposits. The incremental benefit from higher replication income was partly offset by higher campaign-related deposit costs, which had been particularly low in the previous quarter. Looking ahead, on the back of a very strong first half of the year, we expect a higher level of commercial NII than previously guided for the full year. We now expect commercial NII for the full year to be between EUR 16.8 billion and EUR 17 billion. We have also slightly upgraded our 2026 liability margin outlook and now expect the full-year average margin to be in the upper mid-range of 100-110 basis points. Turning to slide 14. The development in fee income clearly reflects the appeal of our customer proposition and increased customer activity across the franchise.

Total fee income grew by EUR 42 million quarter on quarter and was up 14% year on year. In Retail Banking, our fee income rose 16% year on year, supported by a growing customer base and improved cross-selling. We see strong performance across a wide and expanding range of products and services. Our investment products, in particular, continue to perform very well. Customers are increasingly using our services with an 8% rise in number of customers who hold an investment account with ING and with EUR 21 billion of net flows over the past 12 months. As Steven already mentioned, we are successfully capturing a larger share of our customers' overall financial assets, demonstrated by the combination of the EUR 26 billion year-on-year net inflow in retail deposits and EUR 21 billion net inflow in assets under management.

In wholesale banking, fee income grew 11% year-on-year across several products, demonstrating its progress on further income diversification. For the full year, we expect to generate EUR 5 billion in fee income, which is up EUR 400 million year-on-year and implies that we will reach our EUR 5 billion target one year ahead of plan. With that, let's move to slide 15. On this slide, we show the development of all other income. The previous quarter was impacted by hedge ineffectiveness and by lower financial markets results resulting from the heightened market volatility and the sharp increase in interest rates. In the second quarter, we saw a strong recovery in the hedge ineffectiveness result on the back of reduced market volatility. Financial markets also recovered a stronger quarter with improved trading income. Year-on-year, when excluding for positive results from hedge ineffectiveness, all other income decreased.

This is largely due to lower results from foreign currency exchange hedging in treasury, where the benefit from interest rate differentials between our main currencies has gradually come down over the past 12 months. Overall, we expect all other income for the full year to end somewhere between EUR 2.5 billion and EUR 2.7 billion. Next, slide 16, moving to expenses. Expenses excluding regulatory costs and incidental items were up 4.2% year-on-year. Besides annual salary increases, this mainly reflects higher marketing costs, which were particularly low in the first quarter. On a year-to-date basis, our cost growth is tracking at 2.7%, which is well in line with our previously communicated full-year outlook. As a reminder, within this full-year outlook, we had already absorbed EUR 30 million of previous quarter's incidental items, and we will similarly absorb the roughly EUR 30 million of incremental costs this year from the consolidation of TFI.

Incidental items in the second quarter and those that may be booked in the subsequent quarters will be incremental to the full-year outlook. In the second quarter of the year, we have booked EUR 41 million of incidental items, which will result in roughly EUR 40 million of annualized cost savings once fully implemented. Continued digitalization and our scaling of AI solutions increasingly allows us to enable commercial growth through a scalable operating model. As a result, we have improved our full-time employees over customer balances ratio by almost 7% year-on-year. Now, let's move to risk cost on slide 17. Total risk costs were EUR 279 million in the second quarter, equivalent to 15 basis points of average customer lending. This is well below our through-the-cycle average of 20 basis points, reflecting prudent risk management and the quality and strength of our loan book.

Net additions to Stage 3 provision amounted to EUR 270 million, including releases related to the sale of non-performing loans in retail banking. Stage 1 and Stage 2 risk costs were insignificant. The impact from changes in the macroeconomic forecast was offset by a partial release of the management overlay for interest-only mortgages in the Netherlands. Overall, we remain confident in the strength and quality of our loan book. Finally, let me take you to slide 18 to discuss our core equity Tier 1 development. On slide 18, we show the development of our core equity Tier 1 ratio, which improved to 13.1%. Capital generation has been strong, supported by rising profitability and continued capital optimization measures. Overall, we generated 65 basis points in core equity Tier 1 in the quarter, which allowed us to reserve 100% of net results outside the core equity Tier 1 capital.

Risk-weighted assets decreased by EUR 2.4 billion in the quarter. A EUR 0.5 billion FX impact and risk-weighted asset growth from business activity were more than offset by EUR 1 billion of relief from an SRT transaction as well as model updates, a partial reduction in our stake in TTB, and lower market risk-weighted assets. Within wholesale banking, risk-weighted asset management was particularly strong, reflecting continued capital optimization efforts. Wholesale banking risk-weighted assets decreased EUR 5.3 billion in the quarter despite strong lending growth. With that, let me hand back to Steven to wrap up today's presentation.

Thank you, Ida. Before we move to Q&A, let me recap the key takeaways from today's presentation. The consistent execution of our Growing the Difference strategy is delivering increasing value with strong progress across all segments. We are building a larger and deeper customer franchise, increasingly diversifying our income and serving that growth at a lower incremental cost, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of customer growth, earnings growth, capital generation, and increasing shareholder value per share. The rebalancing of the group's profile is progressing ahead of plan with the allocation of capital to higher return segments. Furthermore, our continued capital efficiency allowed for a full reservation of quarterly net profit while still increasing the CET1 ratio to 13.1%.

As a reflection of strong and disciplined execution of our strategy, we are upgrading our RoTE outlook by one percentage point, now expecting an RoTE of more than 15% in 2026 and more than 16% in 2027. With that, I would like to open the floor for Q&A. Operator, over to you. Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. In the interest of time, we kindly ask each analyst to limit yourself to two questions only. We will pause for just a moment while waiting for them to queue for questions. Thank you. We will now take our first question from Benjamin Goy of Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yes. Hi, good morning. Maybe you can give a bit more color on the liability margin going forward now with deposit campaigns. Should we expect a more modest increase in liability margin going forward or by that three basis points a good momentum given the apparent you're having replicating portfolio? The second question on private banking, maybe you can give us a bit more color first on why 40% is a good number rather than a full acquisition, also more color on the general strategy for this pillar, because almost two years and now you have a bit more numbers, but still better to understand the strategy. Is it mainly about gaining wallet share or is it also gaining new clients in these markets? Yeah, I appreciate if you could share. Thank you. All right. Thank you very much, Ben.

I will take the question on private banking and Ida will talk about the liability margin. About private banking, let me start just in general to say, look, we are diversifying our bank, and we have a fantastic customer base where we can become much more impactful and relevant with that customer base. That starts in private individuals, for example, where we have 41 million customers by offering them investment products. We are increasingly doing so. We're broadening and deepening the product propositions to our private individuals, and therefore we see the assets under management growing. That now grew with 27% to EUR 322 billion. Every quarter, we grow the number of people that are investing with us with about 100,000 to 125,000. Every quarter, we see that going up.

Currently, there's about 5.3 million people investing through ING, and that's very good because it's growing. 5.3 compared to the 41 million also still shows that there is an enormous amount of upside. Secondly, we're developing a customer segment that also uses these investment products, but is also a way of serving customers, which is private banking, which is for people who have more money to invest. We set up that third pillar as a separate pillar in our retail banking a couple of years ago. Now rolling it out in all markets because we have a private banking segment in some markets, like the Netherlands or Belgium, but in many markets that did not exist.

We're setting that up, and in doing so, we also look at is there an opportunity to speed up the ability next to organic growth that we can provide new services to the same and to new customers? In Spain, we did that with buying a 40% stake in Singular. Singular is a fantastic private bank with a great customer base, and we're taking a stake in them, therefore collaborating with Singular Bank in doing more with their customers. Also providing our customers with the opportunity to invest in Singular. This is also, for us, an opportunity to learn how to develop private banking in a market in which we until now did not develop private banking activities. That's why we bought the 40% with an option we said already, in the press release, to buy the total at a later point in time.

Ida, liability margin. Thank you, and thanks for your question.

As you noted, the liability margin increased by three basis points in the quarter and is now at 107 basis points. This reflects a disciplined deposit pricing and also, of course, a continued benefit from the replicating portfolio and the tailwind that we already started to see in the second half of last year and continues to see now. We are also seeing this quarter that we have a good uptick in deposits, in a lot of different markets, but also driven back by campaigns in several of our countries. In addition to that, of course, we point to Germany bringing in EUR 7.8 billion this quarter in deposits.

We are not saying anything in terms of campaigns going forward, but if you look at this quarter and compare it to the first quarter, we're more pointing to a normalization of campaign activity following a fairly quiet first quarter, and that's also how I would look at it going forward. When looking at the liability margin outlook, we're saying that we expect to be in the upper mid end of our guidance in terms of 100-110 basis points this year. In 2027 and 2028, we say also expect to be above 110 in a period of time, and then to be normalized going forward back to the levels that we have seen historically. Also driven by the composition of the portfolio, where you know that we have a larger reliance on savings than current accounts, but that's also, of course, dependent on the growth going forward.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

We will now take our next question from Shrey Srivastava of Citigroup. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you for taking my questions. I'd just like to ask about the nature of some of the deposit growth you've seen in the quarter, which has been really quite strong in particularly Germany, if you may. Is it largely new-to-bank customers? Of the customers you attract, there's been a lot of debate around the nature of some of these customers. If you could provide a bit more detail around what's the age profile, how many products do they take up with you, and so on. Just following on from that, my second question is around the nature of some of these, I think you termed it below-the-line deposit campaigns. Could you provide some more detail around how you do the targeting for these campaigns and just the strategy in each market? Thank you. All right. Thank you, Shrey.

On the deposit growth, there was a deposit growth of about EUR 16 billion this year, this quarter. Actually, we grew deposits in all markets. That's of course then largely with existing customers. Of course, we acquired 380,000 new customers, but it was across the board. Two countries stand out. One is the Netherlands, whereby the holiday allowances on the salaries are typically paid in the second quarter, and that causes then additional inflow in the Netherlands. In Germany, we did a below-the-line campaign, so that's a campaign to existing customers, whereby we then do fresh money campaigns, which also therefore increased the deposits over there. On the first question, the answer is, it's largely with existing customers. Now on the campaigns, I think that you asked for quite a bit of detail.

Let me just tell you that the campaign activity varies market by market, and it depends on where we see the most opportunities, and that can sometimes be attracting new-to-bank customers, or we encourage fresh money inflows from existing ones. If you look at new-to-bank customers, a teaser rate or cashback is then a way to get customers on board. Then they get to experience our app or service model, after which many of them remain active clients. Typically, we say when we do a campaign, two-thirds of the fresh money will stay and one-third will flow out after the campaign ends. If you look at existing customers, that was the below-the-line campaign that we did this time around in Germany. Those fresh money campaigns are a tool to increase the share of wallet, and then we give attractive retention rates and short payback periods.

In the second quarter, we see that now happening in Germany. Always when we do these things, it is always highly data-driven. It is always tailored to local objectives, to the local customer base, and local market condition and customer dynamics. That is what I can say about that.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you. We will now take our next question from Giulia Miotto of Morgan Stanley. The line is open. Please go ahead. Thank you. Hi. Good morning.

Thank you for taking my questions. I have two. First of all, on the packages that you have launched this quarter, how is the take-up going? If you can share any stats on that, would be interesting to hear. Then secondly, the ROTE guidance has been upgraded above 16% for next year. But Steven, you are already ahead of a few targets of the previous Capital Markets Day, the capital allocation, the profitability. European banks in general are approaching ROTEs closer to 20%. Can we start dreaming about high teens ROTE, especially as we look into 2028? When can we hear about your medium-term ambitions next? Thank you. Thanks, Giulia, for your questions.

On the subscription packages, we used four subscription packages in a number of our markets earlier this year. To date, 17 million customers have been migrated. By default, customers migrated to an equivalent package. The upselling, because you have ING More and you have ING Max, those are the higher packages. It starts, of course, with basic banking services, but then you can also buy protection services, and you can buy even lifestyle packages on television or online media, or travel. There's many things that you can do when you upsell. Basically we do that because we want to then offer an integral package, because customers are asking for that to make their lives easier to buy a bundle of these services than buy them all separately.

That's also why I said in my presentation, we're moving from a more product-based offering to a more integral client-based offering, depending on the profile of the customer. Now, that upselling requires time. We believe that we can see the benefits of that fee income to start come through later in this year. Also taking into account initial price incentives that we put in place to allow customers to get used to these additional offerings. First start, good. Very positive reactions. A number of thousands of people have already moved to the higher packages, and we can likely more show about that in the second half of this year. When you talk about the ROTE outlook, that's why I started to smile. Yeah, look, of course we updated. I think what we're doing is very good.

You see that the machine is humming, and that's why we are able to update the outlook for 2026 and 2027. Like I also said in the presentation, we keep on working also in the years thereafter to further increase our ROTE. More to come about that at a later point in time.

Thank you. Thank you. We will now take our next question from Benoit Petrarque of Kepler Cheuvreux.

Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning. The first one is on the sustainability of this very strong commercial momentum. You are growing lending and deposits more than 8% for quite some time, actually. Can we expect your 4%-5% range to be conservative? Do you think you can sustainably grow more than 4%-5%? Do you think it is basically a sustainable number to grow above the 5% like you've done in the past quarters? Also linked to that, you've been growing the number of mobile primary customers by almost 400,000 numbers. A lot of banks are fighting for primary customers nowadays. What is the reason behind these very strong achievements? I guess your new subscription model has not yet contributed to that number and will probably contribute in the coming quarters. The next question is on the liability margin.

Could you remind me what is your marginal price rate assumption in your liability margin guidance? Is that still around the 100% for the coming ECB rate moves, basically. Thank you. All right. Let me start with answering the question on the sustainability of the commercial momentum, then Ida will take the question on liability margin.

The commercial momentum starts with getting more customers in and doing more with customers. You also alluded to that 380,000 new mobile primary customer number. The question there is, okay, but how do you then do that? Well, in the end, it starts with providing superior experience. Continue to work on taking friction away, making it easier, making it simpler. That's why we also gave the examples in the presentation about the Agentic Mortgages. We do also mortgages with AI and online mortgages. For example, in Germany, we have online mortgages with AI that people can do in 30 minutes.

When it's a more difficult flow, then we can use Agentic, because then you need additional information or additional steps need to be taken to get risk approvals. In the Netherlands, therefore, we launched Agentic, and we're also going to roll that out in other markets as well. We start also with conversational chats in contact centers, also through GenAI. All these things we continuously do in detail, we measure what are the key journeys, how do we improve, what is the NPS overall, what is the NPS per journey to become better and better. That's why we also measure in how many countries are we number 1, what's the distance to the number 2, in which journeys are we better, and then better to actually be able to grow that.

The question, of course, is, that's why we want to have them as a primary customer, is to do more with them so that the client base becomes sticky and that the lifetime value of the customer then increases. That has to do also with becoming a broader bank. We are now growing the insurance fees, we're growing the investment fees, we're going to grow the investment accounts. We're going to introduce better packages. We're going to become more specific in business banking and private banking, all to become more relevant in the lives of our customers and do more with our customers, because when we know them better, we can also serve them better.

That also then comes back to deposits and lending, because we're driving that primary mobile growth, not only growth, but people who want to use ING as their main bank or one of their main banks. We are continuing to be able to get deposits and provide lending. Now, in that setting, specifically, we do see continued mortgage demand in many markets. That's why we believe we can continue to grow mortgages at a relatively high pace. We are rolling out business banking. That is also driving, therefore, more activity in business banking. Wholesale banking, the momentum is there. I think that that will be a bit more cyclical in wholesale banking. There we see a relatively lower growth. The growth will be higher in retail and lending than in wholesale.

At some point in the longer-term time, we believe that lending and deposit growth will hover around the 5%, but in the shorter term, we believe these will remain at elevated levels.

Thank you. On the liability margin, we don't provide insight in terms of our estimates around pass-through rates. Overall, I think it's important just to highlight that profitability is the guiding principle when it comes to growth, independent of where that growth comes from, either if it's lending or if it's deposits or if it's other type of growth. That also shows in terms of the underlying development that we're seeing this quarter, as well as what we've seen previous quarters. There is continued strong competition in the market and also on deposits, and is expected to be that also going forward. We continue to focus on profitability and continue also to focus on cross-sale, as Steven rightly pointed to as well.

Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. We'll now move on to our next question from Tarik El Mejjad of Bank of America. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Sorry. Good morning. Just a couple of questions from my side. First, on the NII, the liability margin. I wanted, please, to pick your brain on the deposit flows in the future, because the improved outlook, I understand, is from a stronger deposit growth, which could be perceived well in Q2, but also less frequent and less, I guess, aggressive deposit campaigns that you've done in the previous years, especially in Germany and Belgium. Clearly, you've changed your way to attract those deposits. My question is how confident you are, not this quarter or next quarter, but in the medium term, given your deposit franchise in these countries, will still be able to gather those flows into, you just mentioned, Ida, an increasing competition in those two countries.

Really want to understand your view there, because I guess we can only see it in next two quarters if you continue the same strategy. My second question is on capital. Just a clarification. You are growing 100% of earnings. Your dividend policy is 50%, but because you pay those extra distribution, are you then required the ECB to accrue 100%? That doesn't mean you would pay 100%, you adjust at full year, or that means you're actually intending to distribute 100%? I just want to get that clarified. Thank you. All right. I'll talk about the confidence about the liability and deposit flows, and Ida will talk about the capital.

Look, we are becoming more and more precise about how we do, if we do campaigning, how we do campaigning. In the first quarter, there was a relatively low activity, and the second quarter was more activity. We did a bit below-the-line campaigns, and we are alternating between these campaigns where we see fit in terms of existing customers or whether where we want new customers or where we want to focus on broadening our activities with existing or doing that with new customers. We have been proving that. I pointed at our track record for the past many years, and that gives us confidence also that we're able to do that, especially given the fact we continue to grow our mobile primary clients.

That is a proof point that more clients want to do more business with us. Of course, there is competition, and that competition is diversifying, and we see that. In different markets, there are either existing banks or neo banks or banks coming from different jurisdictions. We never should underestimate that, and we don't underestimate that, but we're also confident about how we position us in that, and it starts and stops with giving your customer a superior experience and making sure that the customer chooses you as their primary bank. And that will then bring that benefit of a higher lifetime, including deposits. On capital, Ida. Yes. As you might remember, in the first quarter, we changed our reserving policy also to be in line with EBA guidelines.

As of the first quarter 2026, we reserved both our regular 50% dividend payout policy and potential additional distribution outside at core equity Tier 1. There is no change to our dividend policy. We continue to have the same policy and also have continued to have the same communication around this. We will pay out 50% of net profit to continue providing an attractive shareholder return. Second, we will deploy capital into profitable growth organically or when stringent criteria are met inorganically. As the third, structural excess capital above 13% of core equity Tier 1, but also then including what we're setting aside as profit throughout the year, will continue to be returned to shareholders.

Therefore, we will have to come back to this also, as you know, in the third quarter, which is in line with our previous communication.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you. We will now take our next question from Namita Samtani of Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Morning. Thank you for taking my questions. My first one, there's a lot of focus on the liability margin, but the lending margin deterioration in the second quarter, I just wanted to ask if this was a conscious business decision, i.e., to go into lower margin, higher ROE business. Can you tell me if you're seeing lending margin pressure anywhere in particular across the business, whether it's by country or by product? My second question, on the wholesale bank, I can see the income over RWAs for the first half of 2026. It's 493 basis points annualized, so it's a bit of an improvement since the 470 basis points in 2025, but it's still some way below peers. I can see this quarter the group's been able to grow wholesale revenues, and RWAs have declined quarter-on-quarter, particularly in the rest of the world.

How sustainable is this strategy going forward, and what initiatives are being taken to improve revenues, and ultimately the ROTE of the wholesale business, aside from RWA efficiency in general? Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Namita.

I think on the lending margin, that was not a conscious business decision. What you are seeing is that we continue to grow mortgages at a rapid pace, which is lower risk, lower RWA, and also lower margin activity compared to other parts of the loan book. Within Wholesale Banking, there was also a shift to higher investment-grade loans, and therefore that then also comes at a lower margin. There is not a conscious change in that, and we continue to see the lending margin hovering around this level for the remainder of the year. When we talk about Wholesale Banking income over RWA, it's indeed also a focal point for us. We focus on increasing our income over RWA in Wholesale Banking.

It comes from, on the one hand, continuing to be able to sell or do SRTs or do secondary trading in terms of the loans that we have on our book. Using our capital more efficiently and recycle our capital more efficiently, which is also what we said during our Capital Markets Day. There we said we're going to recycle the capital in Wholesale Banking more and put a relative weight of capital more on the retail side. We said it would be 55, 45, and 27, and now we are 56, 44 for retail, mid 26. We're 18 months ahead. We continue to do that with Wholesale Banking. In terms of the capital, we've now done four basis points of SRTs.

We've said for the year we will do 15-20 basis points in capital improvements, which will largely come from Wholesale Banking, so there's still quite a bit to go. The other element in Wholesale Banking is what we're working on, and you see that coming through as well, is to do more activity on the TS and the financial markets side so that we, again, make more revenues over RWA, not only by decreasing RWA, but also improving the income. For that, we have continuously invested, and that is paying off. We do see more activity. We do see more trade and payment deals coming through, and that we will continue to do to further increase that metric.

That's helpful. Thanks very much.

Thank you. We will now take our next question from Delphine Lee of J.P. Morgan. Your line is open, please go ahead.

Yes, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. My first one is just thinking about your outlook 2027, where your total income has been upgraded by more than EUR 1 billion. Part of that is obviously fees and commission, but I would assume also commercial NII. Just thinking about liability margin, do you think the progression in liability margin can be to the same extent as what we are seeing in current trends in 2026? My second question is, you mentioned the rollout of agentic AI, which has started already. Just trying to understand a little if you are seeing any positive impacts in terms of commercially being able to generate more revenues or any impact on your efficiency on your cost base. Thank you very much. I'll respond on the agentic AI, and I give the liability margin question to Ida.

On agentic AI. We have generative AI, and within that, we then have agentic AI. You asked now specifically on agentic AI. There, what we have seen when we launched this in mortgages in the Netherlands, that we could process a higher number of mortgages with the same people, and that's one. Two, that on those mortgages, because typically you can use already digitization or AI 1.0, if you will, to do, let's say, the basic mortgages, which are, let's say, less complicated with less steps. But with Agentic Mortgages, because I said if you do digital mortgages, fully STP front to back, in some markets, we do those in 30 minutes, time to yes.

The more complicated ones, because that requires additional questions, additional documents, will take a number of days. With Agentic Mortgages launch that we now did in the Netherlands, for that particular portion, we brought the time to yes back from seven days to five days. It's both. It's and more revenues because you can help clients faster, and cost avoidance because you do not need more people for it. Ida, on liability margin. Yes.

Thank you. As previously indicated, and what we also continue to say today, is that we expect the liability margin to be above 110 basis points in 2027 and 2028. Slightly higher than what we expected to be coming out to 2026. This is, of course, also dependent on a number of different things, the interest rate curve as well, because it's really the replication part of the portfolio that is bringing a supporting element to this as well. As you have seen in the first half, the curve has been quite volatile. Even with the curve coming down quarter-on-quarter from coming out to the first quarter into the second quarter, we are increasing our commercial NII outlook for 2026.

Also then pointing to the strong momentum that we see moving into 2027 with the deposit growth of attractive margins and also the back book of broadly stable pricing. Going forward, we will benefit from the structure of our replicating portfolio, both when it comes to the short-term part of it, as also the longer-term repricing upwards. Therefore, also with today's curve, we believe that we may end up above 110 basis points in 2027 and 2028, of course, depending on competitive dynamics and rate developments.

Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. We will now take our next question from Parker Murray of Autonomous. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Just one set of questions, if I may. All on the RWA side, which was really strong at EUR 2.4 billion Q on Q, despite good volumes. I just wondered if you could break out the benefits from model updates and TNB within the Q on Q delta, and in particular, what drove those favorable model updates in terms of product or business line. I'm presuming it's mainly wholesale, but can I get a sense of what products within that? Finally, is that part of an ECB-level ruling program? Presumably more ING specific optimization efforts coming through. Thanks. All right. Ida. Yes.

As previously mentioned by Steven, the SRT that we did related to our wholesale banking portfolio in Germany gave approximately EUR 1 billion of reliefs. In addition to that, we have model updates, which is generating EUR 2.8 billion of reliefs. Apart from that, we don't give any granular details, but you can also see overall that there is a positive development on risk-weighted assets overall.

Are those model updates ING specific or part of a rolling program for the industry?

We continuously update our model portfolio and also in dialogue with ECB, and that could also go in a positive direction, but it could also be in a negative direction depending on this. We're not giving any guidance in terms of future potential on the model side, and this is something that you expect us to see also going forward. This quarter, we see a relief related to model updates of EUR 2.8 billion.

Thanks. Thank you. Once again, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad.

We'll pause for a further moment. Thank you. We'll now take our next question from Alberto Cordara of Intesa. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning. From me, a couple of questions. The first one is you already see T1 around the 13% return raised, but can you please walk me through the order of preference for a marginal EUR of capital? Is it organic lending, bolt-on M&A, like Singular Bank or buyback? What actually wins at the margin today? The second question is, SRT is becoming more structural for you. You've done very little in the past. Now you started doing more and more SRT. You're effectively renting out risk that you used to hold. Does that change through the cycle cost of risk we should assume, or the earnings you keep in a downturn? Thank you. On the order of preference for capital allocation, the first step is profitable growth.

If we can grow at attractive returns, that is where the first point of capital goes to. We look at whether we can accelerate that growth attractively with add-on M&A. We say if there is structural excess of capital above 13%, then we return it to shareholders. That is unchanged from what we previously said. On the SRT users picking up, I will give the floor to Andrea.

Yeah. Users picking up, let's say if I get your question, let's say it is not our intention to change materially our risk appetite or underwriting standards on the back of the externalization of the risk through SRT. We don't expect any material impact resulting from SRT other than the capital optimization on our cost of risk.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you. There are no further questions in queue. I will now hand it back to Steven van Rijswijk for closing remarks.

Yeah. Thank you very much, operator, and thank you very much for all of you on the call for your time and your good questions. I'm sure this is a very busy season for you, so I wish you all the best with that, and hopefully after that you get some well-deserved rest and holiday. Have a great summer and looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you. Thank you. This concludes today's call.

Thank you for your participation.