Ralph Hamers on Transformation, Responsible Finance and Leadership in the Age of AI

Business leaders today are being asked to manage several shifts at once: digital transformation, the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, and rising expectations around sustainability and governance, often under significant economic and regulatory pressure. How to drive change of that scale while holding on to an organisation’s purpose, culture and identity is the central question of Ralph Hamers’ new book.

In Do Your Thing: Lessons from Banking’s Biggest Digital Transformation, Hamers draws on the reinvention of ING to set out practical lessons for leaders managing large-scale change. His central argument is that transformation is not primarily a technology exercise, but the disciplined alignment of purpose, culture, strategy, and innovation, owned at CEO level and held consistent over time. The book includes dedicated chapters on sustainability and on artificial intelligence.

In this edition of the OneStop ESG Thought Leadership Series, Ralph Hamers discusses purpose-led transformation, the future of responsible finance, and what business leaders can learn from large-scale reinvention in the AI era.

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Q1. Your book is called Do Your Thing. What is the idea behind that title, and what is the one lesson you most want a leader to carry away once they have turned the final page?

 

Ralph Hamers: Do Your Thing was never a line we invented for a book. It emerged at the very end of ING’s seven-year transformation, at the moment purpose, culture, customer promise, and brand finally clicked into place.

It is how our purpose sounds when it speaks directly to the people and businesses we serve: our role was to be the enabler, not the hero to help people and businesses get ahead, then get out of the way and run quietly in the background so they can get on with what matters to them.

If a leader closes the book with a single idea, I want it to be this: transformation is not a technology project. It is the disciplined alignment of purpose, strategy, brand/customer promise, and culture, and it only holds if the CEO owns it and keeps it consistent over years, not quarters. Tools and technology change constantly. The reason you exist should not. Everything else — digital, AI, sustainability - works when it is anchored to a clear purpose, and fails when it is bolted on for effect.

 

 

Q2. When you took over ING in 2013, you anchored the entire reinvention in purpose, customer focus and innovation. For leaders who worry that “purpose” has become a slogan, how did you turn it into an operating principle that genuinely drove decisions, and what did it cost you to keep it consistent through the hard quarters?

 

Ralph Hamers: We spent six months on a single sentence — “empowering people to stay a step ahead in life and in business.” People thought that was excessive. I would do it again tomorrow, because purpose only works when it stops being words on a wall and becomes the thing you actually decide by.

The way we made it real was to wire it into the machinery of the bank. Purpose sat at the top of our Strategy on a Page, and from there it shaped our KPIs, our operating plans, and the behaviours we rewarded through the Orange Code, our cultural contract.

If your strategy says one thing and your incentives reward another, people feel the gap immediately, and the brand goes hollow long before it shows up in any dashboard. So we treated purpose as something to be measured and managed, not merely declared. In this, Do Your Thing, is the description of the client experience that can only be delivered if we fully lived up to that purpose.

What did consistency cost? Discipline in the hard quarters, mostly. It is easy to hold to purpose when results are strong; it is tested when earnings are under pressure and the short-term move contradicts what you say you stand for. There were decisions  on which clients to finance, on where to invest ahead of a clear return where staying consistent meant giving something up in the moment. That is the price. You pay it because a purpose you abandon the first time it is inconvenient is worth less than no purpose at all.

 

 

Q3. Your chapter “Impact at Scale” is particularly important for a sustainability audience. Under your leadership, ING became the first bank globally to publish a climate-alignment disclosure and to steer its lending book toward the Paris goals through the Terra approach. What made that possible from the CEO seat, and at a time when ESG faces real political headwinds, what is your honest read on whether the banking sector is now advancing or retreating?

Ralph Hamers: In December 2018 I travelled to Katowice, in the heart of Poland’s coal region, to commit ING to bringing our loan book into line with the Paris Agreement. We became the first bank in the world to commit to reducing its Scope 3 financed emissions in a measurable, science-based way. That became the Terra Approach, and it helped seed what later grew into the Net-Zero Banking Alliance.

What made it possible from the CEO seat was that it was not a side project handed to a sustainability team. It was an extension of our purpose, owned at the top, and built on method rather than announcement. Scope 3,  the emissions of the companies and homes we finance is where a bank genuinely moves the needle, and measuring it credibly took real science and external partners. We also held ourselves to strict Scope 1 and 2 targets first, because you cannot ask clients to move if you are not willing to move yourself.

My honest read today is that the rhetoric is retreating, while the logic is not. Some institutions have gone quieter about their commitments under political pressure, and blanket exclusion is quietly pushing high-carbon financing toward players who will fund it without ever having the transition conversation — which helps no one in the long term. The banks that endure will be the ones that treat climate as risk management and help client transition, not as a marketing posture that switches on and off with the political weather. The physics does not care about the news cycle.

 

 

Q4. Sustainability commitments are easy to announce but hard to sustain through cost pressure, leadership changes and short-term earnings expectations. Drawing on how you embedded climate alignment at ING, what does it actually take to make sustainability durable inside an organisation, rather than a commitment that fades when conditions get tougher?

 

Ralph Hamers: Sustainability survives when it is built into how the business makes money, and it fades when it sits beside the business as a pledge. If your climate strategy depends on good years and goodwill, it will not survive the first bad quarter or the first change of leadership.

At ING, we tried to make it structural in three ways. First, we anchored it in purpose and in risk, not in public relations. Terra existed because the carbon in our loan book is a real risk to our clients and to us, which makes it a board-level topic rather than a communications one.

Second, we chose engagement over exclusion. Walking away from a high-carbon client makes your own numbers look cleaner and changes nothing in the real world; staying in the room with a science-based pathway and hard conversations as we did with a large German power company over its coal exposure is harder, but it actually shifts emissions.

Third, we owned the flip side of our own success. For example, being successful in digital banking is great. For clients, digital banking is convenient, but it erodes financial literacy, so we launched the Think Forward Initiative to help people stay financially self-reliant.

Make it measurable, make it someone’s clear accountability, and tie it to the balance sheet and the brand promise. Do that, and it outlasts the mood of the moment.

 

 

Q5. You wanted ING to be “a tech company with a banking license” long before AI made that ambition urgent, and today you advise AI-driven businesses across finance. As every leader is now told to reinvent around AI, what do they most often get wrong, and where do you see AI genuinely strengthening trust and service, versus quietly eroding the human judgement, culture and accountability that institutions depend on?

 

Ralph Hamers: Long before AI, we said we had to stop thinking like a bank with IT systems and start thinking like a technology company with a banking license — because in a digital bank the entire relationship runs through the technology. There is no branch manager reading your expression. AI is the next turn of that same wheel.

What leaders most often get wrong is treating AI as a speed play: buy the tool, move fast, and hope. AI rewards seriousness and punishes vagueness. It magnifies whatever intent is already there — give it a clear purpose and aligned people and it makes you sharper; give it a fragmented organisation and it scales the confusion just as fast. The organisations that decide what they expect from it, and what they will not allow it to do, move faster and safer than the ones that simply rush in.

Where does it genuinely help? When it removes friction and gives people faster, fairer service and better-informed decisions. Where does it quietly erode things? When fluency gets mistaken for judgment.

The first questions I ask any AI team are the ones I asked recently when I was shown an AI-first wealth platform: what role is each agent playing, where does it stop, and what happens when the model is confident but wrong? Clear roles, explicit boundaries, and human accountability that is never delegated to a model and that is the line between AI that strengthens trust and AI that hollows out the culture beneath it.

 

 

Q6. You led ING through its post-crisis rebuild and later played a central role in the rescue of Credit Suisse, moments when you had to drive transformation in the middle of a crisis. When the pressure is highest and stakeholders are pulling in different directions, what holds a leader, and an organisation, together?

 

Ralph Hamers: I have had to drive change in calm conditions and in genuine crises, and the thing that holds an organisation together is remarkably consistent: a clear reason for what you are doing, communicated honestly and repeatedly, even when — especially when — you do not yet have every answer.

Under pressure, stakeholders pull in different directions because each of them sees a different piece of the problem. The leader’s job is to connect those pieces into one direction and to be visibly consistent about it. People can absorb hard news and difficult trade-offs; what they cannot absorb is a leader who says one thing and does another, or who goes quiet when things get uncomfortable. Trust is built in exactly those moments, and it is spent quickly if you are evasive.

The other anchor is honesty about reality. Transformation is never linear - progress and resistance sit side by side, you will get things wrong, and you have to say so when you do. In a crisis that candour matters even more, because the temptation is to project false certainty. What actually steadies an organisation is a leader who holds conviction on direction while being straight about the details, and who keeps connecting the dots long after the initial adrenaline has faded.

 

 

Q7. If you could offer one piece of advice to a leader being asked to navigate transformation, AI, culture and sustainability all at once, the exact situation your book speaks to, what would it be?

 

Ralph Hamers: Do not treat them as four separate programs competing for your attention. They are one question wearing four hats: does your organisation know what it is for, purpose, what its strategy is, and is everything - your technology, your AI, your culture, your climate strategy aligned to that?

So begin with purpose, and then be consistent to the point of stubbornness. Purpose is what lets you act at eighty percent instead of waiting for a certainty that never comes, because it keeps you pointed the right way while the details catch up. It is what tells you which AI use cases to chase and which to refuse, which clients to help through their transition, and which trade-offs are worth making. And it is the one thing you, as CEO, can never delegate not to a strategy team, not to a consultant, not to a model.

Following a purpose all the way through also means owning what I call the flip side. Real success produces negative side effects, and a purpose-led leader has to take responsibility for them, first by being aware they exist, then by working to mitigate them. Not by being less successful, but by being deliberate about how you deliver on your strategy and which initiatives can limit the downside. I gave one example earlier: the convenience of digital banking quietly eroded people's everyday financial literacy, and owning that meant acting on it rather than looking away. AI will ask the same of us. The real question is never only what your strategy achieves, but what it costs the people and systems around it, and what you intend to do about that.

Adapt boldly, guided by that purpose, and you turn disruption into advantage. Hesitate, and the disruption will define you instead. That was true for digital. It is just as true for AI and for sustainability. Do your thing and do it consistently.