ING Bank Australia’s head of retail banking for the past three years, Melanie Evans, has been appointed to the top job at the bank.
Evans will replace Uday Sareen who served as chief executive of ING Australia for four years and is now moving on to head wholesale banking for ING Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Evans started as a St George Bank cadet in 1995, while she was doing her commerce degree at the University of New South Wales. Since then she has worked at BT and then Westpac, where her last role was director of marketing, sales and service in the business bank.
Sareen led a successful expansion of the bank’s product set, introducing wholesale lending, a credit card, personal loan and youth account.
In recent years ING has also added travel and car insurance to the product mix, through a partnership with A&G.
This set the bank up to promote itself up as a main financial institution just as people were looking for an alternative to big banks in the wake of the Hayne royal commission.
According to the bank’s 2019 annual report, 423,000 new customers joined the bank last year, taking the total to 2.6 million. The number of customers who described ING as their primary bank rose 30 per cent to 833,000.
Evans said in a statement that she planned to continue diversifying the bank’s business.