Steven van Rijswijk

Overview

Steven van Rijswijk
Born	1970 (age 55–56) Netherlands
Citizenship	Netherlands
Education	Master's degree in business economics
Alma mater	Erasmus University Rotterdam
Occupation(s)	Banker, business executive
Employer	ING Group
Known for	Long-serving ING executive and CEO focused on digital banking and risk management
Title	Chief executive officer of ING Group
Term	2020–present
Predecessor	Ralph Hamers
Board member of	Institute of International Finance; Dutch Banking Association; Cyber Security Council of the Netherlands
Children	3

🏦 Steven van Rijswijk (born 1970) is a Dutch banker who has served as chief executive officer (CEO) of ING Group, one of Europe’s largest banks, since July 2020. Over a career of more than twenty-five years at ING, he has moved from mergers and acquisitions and equity capital markets into senior client coverage and risk roles, culminating in his appointment as chief risk officer (CRO) in 2017 and then CEO three years later. As chief executive, van Rijswijk has combined continuity in ING’s digital banking strategy with a sharper focus on core markets, cost discipline, and strengthened risk and climate policies.

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Early life and education

🎓 Background and upbringing. Steven van Rijswijk was born in 1970 in the Netherlands and grew up in a Dutch environment without any publicly known family banking background or indications of exceptional privilege, an origin that later informed his self-description as “an employee – okay, CEO – of ING” rather than a public celebrity. Consistent with that modest public image, he has repeatedly indicated that he prefers to keep his private life separate from his responsibilities at the bank.

📚 Education and early career choice. Van Rijswijk studied business economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he obtained a master’s degree that anchored his interest in finance and economics and prepared him for a career in banking. Shortly after graduating he joined ING in 1995, a move that marked the beginning of a long-term commitment to a single institution rather than a series of career pivots, and set him on a steady trajectory inside the group.

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Career

💼 Investment banking and corporate clients. In his early years at ING, van Rijswijk worked on mergers and acquisitions and equity capital markets transactions, developing a reputation among colleagues for analytical rigor and reliability in complex deal work. By 2010, after the global financial crisis, he had progressed through a series of capital-markets roles to become head of ING’s Corporate Clients division, positioning him at the center of the bank’s relationships with large corporate borrowers.

🌐 Global client coverage. In 2014 he was appointed global head of Client Coverage for ING’s Wholesale Banking arm, taking responsibility for corporate relationships and financing in more than forty countries and overseeing the integration of lending, transaction services, and advisory activities for multinational clients. During this period the corporate banking franchise recovered from crisis-era pressures, with van Rijswijk credited internally for tightening coordination across business lines and helping to rebuild ING’s presence among large corporate customers.

🛡️ Shift into risk management. In 2017 van Rijswijk moved from front-office deal-making into risk management when he became ING’s chief risk officer and joined the executive board, a transition that coincided with heightened regulatory scrutiny following shortcomings in the bank’s anti–money-laundering controls. As CRO he played a prominent role in strengthening ING’s “gatekeeper” function, investing heavily in customer due diligence, transaction monitoring, and data analytics to prevent financial crime and to respond to regulators’ concerns about the bank’s past failures.

📈 Appointment as chief executive. When long-serving CEO Ralph Hamers left ING in 2020 to lead UBS, van Rijswijk was chosen as his successor and became CEO on 1 July 2020, with the supervisory board citing his combination of experience, leadership skills, and deep understanding of the organization. His promotion came at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring him to manage health-related disruptions while maintaining support for customers and staff and ensuring that the bank’s operations remained resilient.

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Leadership and strategy at ING

💻 Digital banking and continuity. As CEO, van Rijswijk signaled continuity with his predecessor’s emphasis on digital innovation, repeatedly describing ING as one of Europe’s leading digital banks and committing to invest further in mobile and online services while keeping customer focus at the center of the strategy. Under his leadership, the bank has continued to refine its digital platforms and back-end systems in order to standardize processes and simplify the technology landscape across markets.

🗺️ Geographic focus and retrenchment. Van Rijswijk also pursued a sharper focus on core retail markets, deciding to exit consumer-banking operations in countries where ING lacked scale, including France, Austria, the Czech Republic, and the Philippines. He has remarked that after two decades of trying to build critical mass in France, the bank concluded that its efforts would not produce a sustainable position, reinforcing his view that retail banking requires either sufficient scale or withdrawal.

🚀 Growth markets and acquisitions. While retreating from some markets, van Rijswijk has identified Germany, Italy, Spain, and Australia as priority growth countries where ING aims to deepen its universal-banking model and is open to acquisitions that could accelerate expansion. He has commented that other European banks now recognize ING’s ambition to grow through selective deals, even as he declines to address specific merger-and-acquisition speculation.

⚙️ Cost discipline, workforce and technology. A recurring theme of his tenure has been cost discipline and operational simplification, including job reductions linked to digitalization and automation; in the Netherlands alone, ING announced plans to cut up to 950 positions by 2026 as systems and processes became more standardized. Van Rijswijk has stated that digitalization and artificial intelligence will continue to reshape ING’s workforce, with technology taking over routine activities while the bank redeploys staff toward more complex and customer-facing work.

🏗️ Resilience and operational focus. Beyond specific restructuring moves, van Rijswijk has emphasized making ING “more focused, consolidated, and standardized” in its technology and operations so that it can better withstand external shocks and regulatory demands. He argues that banks must assume systems will occasionally fail and therefore maintain backup solutions and scenario plans, an approach shaped by what he describes as a series of “tail risk” events that have affected ING since 2020, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, inflation spikes, and natural disasters in key markets.

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Financial performance, wealth and external roles

💶 Bank performance under his tenure. ING’s financial performance strengthened notably during van Rijswijk’s early years as CEO, as pandemic-era loan loss provisions fell and interest rates increased; by 2023 the bank reported net profit of around €7.2 billion, roughly double the previous year, and a return on equity above 14 percent. The improvement enabled ING to resume substantial shareholder distributions, including multibillion-euro dividends and share buybacks between 2023 and 2025, contributing to a strong recovery in the bank’s share price compared with its early-2020 lows.

💵 Remuneration and pay trends. Van Rijswijk’s compensation has tracked the bank’s performance within the constraints of Dutch post-crisis rules that limit variable pay; in 2021 his total remuneration was reported at approximately €2.1 million, up sharply from the pandemic year when ING executives waived bonuses, and by 2022 Dutch media estimated his package at about €2.6 million. He has occasionally declined or reduced variable compensation in response to public sentiment, mindful of earlier controversies in the Netherlands about bank executive pay.

📊 Personal shareholding and net worth. Unlike some global bank chiefs who receive large stock grants, van Rijswijk’s wealth is relatively modest compared with international peers; he is reported to hold roughly 112,000 ING shares, representing less than 0.01 percent of the company and valued at around US$3 million in late 2025, alongside three decades of cumulative salary and bonus income. Analysts therefore generally place his net worth in the single-digit millions of dollars, framing him more as a career company executive than an entrepreneurial financier.

🌐 Industry roles and ancillary positions. In addition to his responsibilities at ING, van Rijswijk has taken on several sector-level roles, including serving on the management board of the Dutch Banking Association (Nederlandse Vereniging van Banken) and on the Netherlands’ Cyber Security Council, where he participates in discussions on financial stability and digital resilience. Internationally he sits on the board of directors of the Institute of International Finance, giving him a platform in debates on global financial regulation and banking policy.

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Controversies and public debates

⚖️ Anti–money-laundering scandal. The most serious controversy affecting ING in recent years predates van Rijswijk’s time as CEO but overlaps with his tenure as chief risk officer; in 2018 Dutch authorities fined the bank €775 million for structural failings in its anti–money-laundering controls, leading to intense regulatory scrutiny and the resignation of the chief financial officer. Van Rijswijk has described the episode as the most difficult period of his career, noting that the compliance remediation “kept coming up in the boardroom,” and under his leadership the bank significantly expanded its know-your-customer and transaction-monitoring programs to rebuild trust with supervisors and the public.

🌱 Climate policy and fossil-fuel financing. As CEO, van Rijswijk has faced persistent criticism from climate activists who label ING the Netherlands’ largest “fossil bank” because of its lending to oil and gas companies, with groups such as Extinction Rebellion disrupting the 2023 annual meeting to protest the bank’s policies. He acknowledges the urgency of climate change and argues that ING should be “part of the solution” by helping clients transition, pointing to decisions to halt financing for new oil and gas fields and to adopt 2030 emissions targets for the loan book, but critics counter that the bank continues to support fossil expansion and that its actions fall short of its rhetoric.

🧑‍🏭 Labor relations and stakeholder expectations. Although shareholders have generally welcomed ING’s profit rebound and capital distributions, Dutch labor unions have questioned whether employees share proportionately in the benefits, especially as job cuts accompany digitalization and some functions are moved to lower-cost hubs abroad. In a 2024 analysis, the union De Unie noted that ING’s profit had doubled while many staff salaries lagged inflation and urged van Rijswijk to ensure that strong results “indeed benefit all stakeholders,” highlighting the social trade-offs embedded in his cost and efficiency agenda.

🏛️ Regulation, capital and European competitiveness. Van Rijswijk has also entered broader policy debates about the competitiveness of European banking, arguing that fragmented and uneven capital rules across the European Union constrain banks’ ability to lend and invest. He has offered the example that if ING were headquartered several hundred kilometers to the east, in a different jurisdiction, it would face materially lower capital requirements, and has advocated greater regulatory harmonization, deeper European capital markets, and, more recently, support for defense-related investments as part of strengthening the continent’s economic base.

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Personal life and leadership style

🐾 Family and leisure. Van Rijswijk is married with three children and lives with his family in a town outside Amsterdam, where he balances his responsibilities at ING with a private life he prefers to keep largely out of the spotlight. In rare personal comments he has mentioned playing padel, a racket sport gaining popularity in Europe, and walking the family dog—tasks he jokes his children sometimes manage to avoid—while questioning why the public would be interested in such details.

🧠 Communication and media presence. Colleagues and journalists often describe van Rijswijk as analytical, meticulous, and cautious in public communication; in one two-hour interview he spoke slowly, carefully choosing his words, occasionally fiddling with pens on the table and challenging what he saw as oversimplifications, at one point asking an interviewer, “Are you trying to put words in my mouth?” He has admitted that he rarely gives extensive interviews because he worries about being misquoted, preferring instead to let financial results and written communications convey his message.

👥 Management practices and board dynamics. Inside ING’s Amsterdam headquarters, van Rijswijk is known for favoring an open office environment in which he sits at a regular desk alongside other senior executives, rather than in a secluded corner office, in order to keep communication lines short and foster collaboration. Formal board meetings still take place in a traditional boardroom, which he has said can be intense enough that the timing was shifted from Monday mornings to afternoons so that participants arrive better prepared for difficult discussions and decisions.

🧩 Temperament and self-image. Those who work closely with van Rijswijk often portray him as calm and unflappable during crises, a demeanor he attributes to meticulous preparation and scenario planning, reflecting his background in risk management. Despite his reserved public persona, colleagues note a lighter, self-deprecating side in smaller groups, including jokes about eventually having more time to walk the dog when he retires, and observers sometimes remark that he “bleeds ING orange,” a shorthand for his deep identification with the bank where he has spent his entire career.

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Legacy and assessment

📌 Role in ING’s evolution. As of the mid-2020s, van Rijswijk’s legacy at ING is still evolving, but he is closely associated with consolidating the bank’s digital-banking strategy, refocusing its geographic footprint, and reinforcing its risk and compliance culture in the wake of regulatory failures. Supporters inside the organization credit him with steering a roughly €950 billion-asset bank through a sequence of external shocks while maintaining profitability and capital strength, and with embedding a more data-driven approach to risk across the group.

🔮 Future direction. Van Rijswijk has indicated that he expects to remain in his role for the foreseeable future, stating that he draws energy from leading the bank and sees it as his mission to complete its transformation toward a simpler, more digital, and more sustainable institution. Commentators suggest that he will continue to be judged on how successfully he balances growth ambitions with prudence, responds to climate and social expectations, and maintains ING’s position in a European banking sector he believes must adapt or fall further behind global competitors.

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