#210: Daniele Tonella – CTO of ING – leading 20,000 tech professionals, AI beyond the hype, “garbage in, disaster out”, introversion and the drive to build

Daniele Tonella is Chief Technology Officer and a member of ING’s Management Board Banking. Since August 2024, he has been responsible for ING’s global technology landscape and advises the Management Board on technology-driven business opportunities. As he puts it, his role covers almost everything at ING that contains “a chip or a line of code.”

He leads a global technology organisation of around 20,000 employees. His responsibilities include the reliability and security of ING’s systems, engineering productivity, the transition to scalable global technology platforms and cloud-native architecture, and innovation in areas such as artificial intelligence.

Before joining ING, Daniele was Group Chief Information Officer at UniCredit and CEO of UniCredit Services. Earlier in his career, he led AXA Technology Services, served as Global CIO at Evalueserve, held technology and operations leadership roles at Swiss Life, and worked in consulting at Mercer Management Consulting and McKinsey & Company.

Daniele grew up in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland and studied engineering at ETH Zurich. He later completed executive education programmes at Harvard, IMD, INSEAD and MIT Sloan. Daniele is 54, is married, lives in Switzerland and has four children.

In this conversation, Daniele discusses what it takes to lead technology at scale, why AI can turn “garbage in, garbage out” into “garbage in, disaster out,” and how ING balances innovation with standardisation, security and resilience. He also reflects on his leadership style, the future of junior engineers, technological sovereignty, introversion, family life and his lifelong desire to build things.

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Books mentioned in this episode: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking – Susan Cain On Bullshit – Harry G. Frankfurt

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Previous guests on the Leaders in Finance podcast include: Klaas Knot (President of DNB), Frank Elderson (Member of the Executive Board of the ECB), Roland Boekhout (CEO of de Volksbank), Gerrit Zalm (former Minister of Finance and former CEO of ABN AMRO), Ingrid de Swart (Member of the Executive Board of a.s.r.), Pinar Abay (Member of the Management Board of ING and Head of Retail Banking), Robert Swaak (CEO of ABN AMRO), Marcel Zuidam (CEO of NN Bank), Saul van Beurden (CEO of Consumer, Small & Business Banking at Wells Fargo), David Knibbe (CEO of NN Group), Jani…