 Good morning, brilliant humans. Good afternoon or good evening, depending on your time zone. My name is Savannah Peterson and I'm here live with theCUBE. We are at KubeCon in Detroit, Michigan and joining me is my beautiful co-host Lisa. How you feeling afternoon of day three? Afternoon day three. We've had such great conversations. Day three has been fantastic. The momentum has just been going like this. I love it. Yes, you know, sometimes we feel a little low when we're at the end of a conference. Not today. Don't feel that way at all, which is very exciting. Just like the guests that we have up for you next. Kind of an unexpected player when we think about technology. However, since every company, one of the themes is every company is trying to be a software company, I love that we're talking to ING. Joining us today is Tice Ebers and Arno Vonk. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. Yes, it's wonderful. All the way in from Amsterdam, probably some of the farthest flying folks here for this adventure. Starting off, I got it. What's going on with the shirts, guys? You match very well. Tell everyone. Well, these are our VR code shirts. VR code is basically the player for a company to get people interested as an IT person in banking. Basically people don't think banking is a good place to work as an IT professional. But actually it is. And we are using the VR code grants with these nice logos to get attention. I love that. So actually, let's just talk about that for a second. Why is it such an exciting role to be working in technology at a company like ING or a traditional bank? ING is a challenging environment. But how do you make an engineer happy? Basically, give them a problem to solve. So we have lots and lots of problems to solve. So that makes it challenging. But yeah, also rewarding. And you can say a lot of things about banks. But looking at the IT perspective, we are doing amazing things in ING. And that's what we talked about. Can you tell us any of those amazing things? Are they secrets? That's what we talked about last Tuesday at the Opusheff Conference Conference. So we had two presentations. I presented with my co-host Sandeep on our journey over the last three years. So what does ING do? Basically building a secure container hosting platform. How do you live a bank with security, with cloud-native technology. And Arno Vunk, together with our co-host Jan Willem, presented, actually showed it by demo-making, live in person. So we were not just presenting all- It's not all-smoking mirrors. It's not smoking mirrors. We're not presenting a virtual marketing blob. No, we're actually doing it today. And that's what we wanted to share here. Well, as consumers, we expect we can access our banking on any device, 24 by seven. I want to be able to do all my transactions in a way that I know is secure. Obviously, security is a huge thing there. But talk about, ING Bank Arno has been around for a very long time. Talk about this financial institution as a software company, really. Obviously, a lot of challenges and a lot of opportunity. But talk about what it's like working for a history bank that's really now a tech company. Yes, we're really changing as a bank to a tech company. We have a lot of developers and operators. And we deliver, we run on-prem, we run in the public. So we have a huge engineers and people around it to make our software. Yes. And I am responsible for the ING Container and we deliver that in the namespace as a service and as a real, real secure environment. So our developers, all our developers in ING can request it, but they only get a namespace. That's very important. They get resources and that sort of things. And they cannot access it. They can only access it by one pipeline. So Lisa and I were chatting before we brought you up here. Namespace as a service, this is a newer term for us, educate us. What does that mean? Basically it means we don't give a full cluster to our consumers. They only give them basically CPU memory networking. That's all they need to host the application. Everything else we abstract away and especially in a banking context where compliance is a big thing, you don't need to do compliance for entire Kubernetes cluster as a developer. Which really saves development time for the colleagues in the bank. Decreases the complexity of projects which is a huge theme here, especially at scale. I can imagine, I mean, my gosh, you're serving so many different people. It probably saves you time. Let's talk about regulation. What, how challenging is that for you as technologists to balance in all the regulations around banking and infant tech? It's not like some of these kind of wild, wild West industries where we can just go out and play and prototype and do whatever we want. There's a lot of rules. There's a lot of rules and the problem is you have legislation and you have the real world. Right. And you have to find something. They're not the same thing? You have to find something in between with both parties on the stands and cannot adhere to. So the challenge we had, basically, we had to write our own container security standards to prove that the things we were doing were the right things to be in control as a bank. Because there was no market standard for container security. So basically, we put some input from NIST. So NIST did a lot of good work basically added some things on top to be valid for a bank in Europe. So yeah, that's what we did. And the nice thing is today, we take all the boxes we defined back in 2019. Hey, so you, I guess the rules are a little bit easier when you get to help define them. Yeah. Yeah, it feels like a very good strategic call. At least then they make sense. Yeah, yeah. Because the hardest problem is try to be compliant for something that doesn't make sense. Right, right. Arne, talk about, let's double click on namespace as a service. You talked about what that is, but give us a little bit of information on why ING really believes this is the right approach for this company. It's protect what is for the security that developers doing things they don't do. Yeah, they cannot access their stuff anymore when it is running in production. And that is the most, most important. That is immutable running in our platform. Excellent, talk about, both of you, how long have you both been at ING for a long time? I've been with ING since September 2001, so that's more than 20 years now. Long time, Arne, what about you? I'm before 2000 already. Before, so both of you comment on this a long time. Yeah. Talk about the culture of innovation that's at ING to be able to move at such speed and be groundbreaking in what you're, how are you using technology? What's the appetite like at the bank to embrace new and emerging technologies? So we're really looking, basically, the mantra of the bank is to help our customers get a step ahead in life and in business. And we do that by one, superior customer service and secondly, sustainability at the heart. So anything which contributes to those targets, you can go to your manager and if you can make good case why it contributes, most of the cases you get some time or some budgets or even some additional colleagues to help you out and give it a try. We're quite, from a culture perspective, we're quite open to trying things out before we reach production. Once you go to production, yeah, then we're back to being a bank and you need to take all the boxes to make really sure that we are confident with our customers' data and basically, we're still a bank. But a lot of it is possible. A lot of it is possible and of course there's the customer on the other end who's expecting, like I said earlier, that they can access their data anytime that they want, be able to do any transaction they want, making sure the content that's delivered to them is relevant, that it's secure obviously, that's the biggest challenge, especially as we think about how many generations are alive today and those that aren't tech-savvy have challenges with that. Talk about what the bank's dedication is to ensuring from a security perspective that its customers don't have anything to worry about. That's always a thin line between security and the user experience. So, ING, like every other bank, needs to make choices. Do we want it really easy for customers and take the risk that somebody abuses it? Or do we make it really, really secure and alienate part of our customer base? And that's an ongoing debate. That's a hard one. That's a trade-off. Yeah. So it's really hard. Interesting part is, in Netherlands, we had some debate about banks closing down locations. But the moment we introduced our mobile app on iPad, basically the debate became a lot quieter because a lot of elderly people couldn't work with an iPhone. It turned out they were perfectly fine with a well-designed iPad app to do their banking. Really? Okay. But that's already learning from like 15 years ago. What was the product roadmap on that? So, I mean, I can imagine you release a mobile app, you're not really thinking that... Basically, I think that was a happy coincidence. We just went out to design a very good mobile app. And then looking all afterwards at the statistics, you say, hey, who's using this? Hey, we've got somebody who's signing on and I don't know the exact age, but it was something like somebody of 90 plus who signed on to use that mobile app. Wow. Wow. I mean, you really are the five different generations living and working right now. Designing technology, everybody has to go to the bank whether we are fans of our bank or not. Although now I'm thinking about ING as a bank in general, we all have a very good attitude about it. What has kept you at the company for over 20 years? That is, we see people move around, especially in the technology industry, every two to three years sometimes, obviously you're in positions of leadership, they're obviously taking good care of you, but I mean, multiple decades, why have you stuck? Well, first I didn't have the same job in ING for two decades. Nice, yeah. So I went around to the infrastructure domain, I did storage initially, I did security, I did solution design, and in the end, I ended up in enterprise architecture. So yeah, it's not like I stuck 20 years in the same role. So every so many years I... You had a chance to really go up the ladder, but also grow your own skill sets. Explore, yeah. So basically, I think that's what everybody should be thinking these days. If you're in the cloud native industry, if you're good at it, you can come on quite a nice salary. But that also means that you have some kind of obligation to society to make a difference. And I think... Yeah, I wouldn't say that everybody feels that way. I'd like to make a difference with ING. A difference for being more available to our consumers, be more secure to our consumers. And I think that's what's driving me to stick with the company. What about you, Arnaud? Yes, for me it's very important that every two, three years I'm doing new things. I can work with the latest technology. So it becomes really, really innovative. So that is the place to be. Yeah, you sort of get that rotation every two to three years with the different tools that you're using. Speaking of, we're here, we're at KubeCon, we're talking cloud native, we're talking Kubernetes. Do you think it's possible to, I'm coming back to the regulations, do you think it's possible to get to banking grade security with cloud native tech? Initially I said we would be at least as secure as institutional IT. But last Tuesday we've proven we can get more secure than institutional IT. So yeah, definitely, yes. Awesome, I mean, sounds like you've proved it to yourself too, which is really saying something. Well, we actually have pandemic results and of course I cannot divulge those, but they were pretty good. Can you define, I want to kind of double-click on banking grade security. Define what that is, banking grade security and how could other industries aim to hit that level? What is that standard? I want security everywhere I go, especially in my bank. The architecture is zero privilege. So you hear a lot about lease privilege in all the security talks. That's not what you should be aiming for. Zero privilege is what you should be aiming for. And once you're at the zero privilege environment, okay, who can leak data? No natural person has access to it. Even if you have somebody invading your infrastructure, there are no privileges, they cannot do privilege escalations. Yeah. So the answer for me is very clear. If you are handling customer data, if you're handling customer funds, aim for zero privilege architecture. What are you most excited about next? What's next for you guys? What's next for ING? What are we going to be talking about when we're chatting to you right here at KubeCon next year? Or in Amsterdam actually, since we're headed that way in the spring. Which is fun. Happy to be your host in Amsterdam. So the other way around. We're holding you to that. You've talked about how fun the culture is. Now you're going to have show Lisa and I. But we need the t-shirts. We obviously need a matching outfit. We'll arrange some t-shirts for you as well. Yeah. No, for me to highlight from this KubeCon, the first one was KCP. That can potentially be a paradigm change on how we deal with workloads on Kubernetes. So that's very interesting. I don't know if you see any implementations by next year. That's definitely something we'll track. We had them on the show as well. So it's very fun. I'm sure they'll be very flattered that you just said that. What about you Arno? Has that got you most excited? The most important thing we was talking to a lot of Asian is other people, what is they thinking, how we go forward. So the community and talk to each other and also with vendors and people, how we go forward. Yeah, that's been a big theme for us here on the Kube and just the energy, the morale. I mean, the open source community is so collaborative. It creates an entirely different ethos. Arno, Tyce, thank you so much for being here. It's wonderful to have you and hear what ING is doing in the technology space. Lisa, always a pleasure to co-host with you. Of course. And thank you, KubeVans, for hanging out with us here on day three of KubeCon, live from Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson and we'll see you up next for a great chat coming soon.