Biography|Ralph Hamers — The Sandcastle in the Bijlmer Where He Became ING's Youngest CEO

On 22 February 2013 ING named the head of its Belgian and Luxembourg banks as the next group chief executive.

Shareholders confirmed him to the executive board at the annual meeting on 13 May 2013.

The handover was set for 1 October.

That morning, at the Amsterdamse Poort headquarters in Amsterdam-Zuidoost, Ralph Hamers succeeded Jan Hommen. He was 47, the youngest chief executive in the group's history.

The building the Dutch call Het Zandkasteel — the Sandcastle — had been the NMB and then ING head office since 1987.

Ton Alberts and Max van Huut designed ten sloping towers in sand-coloured brick, linked by a 350-metre internal street, on Bijlmerplein 888.

By 2013 the group had already left the glass shoe on the A10 ring and folded its head office back into this Bijlmer complex.

Hamers had joined ING in 1991 in structured finance. He had run the Romanian unit, the Dutch bank, the commercial-banking network, and then Belgium and Luxembourg.

The job he inherited was still a cleanup.

The Dutch state had put 10 billion euros into ING after 2008.

Hommen had split bank from insurer and sold overseas books. The last of the state aid still had to be repaid.

What followed on his watch was a thinner branch network and a heavier bet on mobile banking, the strategy the financial press tagged as digital.

The Sandcastle is no longer a bank. It became a municipal monument in 2017.

ING moved two streets away to the new Cedar building in January 2020. Since 2023 the old towers hold apartments, a school, offices, and event rooms.

The pin is the building where the title changed hands, not the later glass box.

Photo: ING Bank headquarters at Amsterdamse Poort, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.