ING Direct had built a strong digital banking proposition but needed a physical touchpoint that would reinforce its human, approachable brand values without becoming a traditional branch network. The challenge was to design an in-person experience that felt authentically ING — not like a bank dressed as a café.
Vivaldi developed the experience strategy for ING Cafés — physical spaces offering free Wi-Fi, branded coffee, and self-serve financial tools. The cafés were designed to build brand affinity, introduce ING Direct to new customers, and provide existing digital customers with a tangible brand experience.
The ING Café model boosted deposits, drove digital loyalty, and significantly exceeded growth expectations — establishing a new paradigm for how financial services brands could use physical experience to deepen digital relationships. The model has since been studied as a reference case in financial services customer experience design.
ING Direct partnered with Vivaldi to design the experience strategy behind ING Cafés, a physical touchpoint network that gave its digital banking brand a human, approachable presence without becoming a traditional branch network. The café model boosted deposits, drove digital loyalty, and exceeded growth expectations, establishing a new paradigm for how financial services brands can use physical experience to deepen digital customer relationships.
ING Direct was a direct banking subsidiary of ING Group, the Dutch multinational banking and financial services corporation. At its peak, ING Direct was one of the largest savings banks in the United States, with over 7 million customers and more than $80 billion in deposits. The company was widely recognized for its no-fee, customer-friendly model and its pioneering use of branded café spaces as a human touchpoint in an otherwise digital banking experience.
Vivaldi designed the customer experience strategy behind ING Cafés, physical spaces that offered free Wi-Fi, branded coffee, and self-serve financial tools as a tangible reinforcement of ING Direct’s human, approachable brand. The cafés boosted deposits, drove digital loyalty, and significantly exceeded growth expectations, establishing a reference model that has since been studied widely in financial services customer experience design.
The design started from how the brand should feel rather than how a bank should look, which meant the physical space had to deliver the same warmth and self-direction that defined the digital product. Branded coffee, free Wi-Fi, and self-serve financial tools were chosen because they served the customer first and the bank second, which is the inverse of how traditional branches are designed and the reason most attempts at bank-café hybrids feel inauthentic.
Digital-first banks lose the moment a customer wants to do something that feels too consequential for a screen, which historically meant the customer left for an incumbent with branches. A small network of high-affinity physical spaces solves that problem without rebuilding a branch footprint, because the cafés signal that the brand is real, accessible, and human while keeping the operating model fundamentally digital.
The transferable lesson is that physical presence is not the opposite of digital strategy, it is a high-leverage component of it when the physical touchpoint is designed to reinforce what makes the digital product different. Digital-native brands across categories from fintech to DTC are converging on the same insight, which is that a handful of well-designed physical spaces can do more for brand affinity and acquisition than hundreds of millions in paid media.
