integrityworks worked closely with ING staff to first perform a company wide corporate ethics consultation, then to develop a Statement of Business Principles, and finally in the production and implementation of a worldwide education and training program distributed via web-connected CD-ROM.

Here is what the Financial Times had to say:

How does a multinational persuade 83,000 staff in 66 countries to sign up to the same ethical standards? The solution for ING, the Dutch financial group that encompasses Barings of London, the US insurer Equitable of Iowa and Poland's Bank Slaski, is to train them with an interactive CD-Rom linked to the Internet.

Over the coming year, employees from Hungary to Egypt and Mexico to Taiwan will watch the same ethical dilemmas being played out on screen and discuss with their local managers how best to handle them. They will hear board members talk to them about the group's business principles by video, embedded in the CD-Rom, and will be able to offer feedback via the corporate web site.

"We know of no other leading company, and certainly none in financial services, that has developed such a tool containing these features," Alexander Rinnooy Kan, executive board director, told top managers when he introduced them to the training programme at a conference in Noordwijk, near The Hague, this summer.

"What ING is doing is ground-breaking, both in terms of the technology and the approach," says John Drummond, managing director of the UK arm of integrityworks, the consultancy that helped draw up the statement of principles and produced the CD-Rom.

The Financial Times, ING: Principles that work in practice, August 26, 1999