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How it started
Origins in insurance and banking
The ING Group traces its roots to two major insurance companies in the Netherlands and the banking services of the Dutch government. Its oldest predecessor was the burial fund Kooger Doodenbos, founded in 1743 in Koog aan de Zaan in North Holland, by nine local men. They declared that they were entering into a contract with one another "for the collection and deposit of funds, which are to be used for a proper burial of the partners of the said contract".
An initial sum of fl. 300 was transferred to the savings bank in 1820, and by 1835 the fund decided to stop distributing its surplus cash and invest it in the bank or in securities instead. In 1949, the Kooger Doodenbos — contributing an insured capital of fl. 30,915 and 229 contracts — merged into Vesta, a birth-benefit life insurer that had relocated from Amsterdam to Arnhem. Through a series of further mergers, it eventually became part of Nationale-Nederlanden.
Insurance branch
On 12 April 1845, the fire insurance company Assurantie Maatschappij tegen Brandschade de Nederlanden van 1845 ("Fire Insurance Company of the Netherlands of 1845") was founded, as approved by King Willem II. The company grew to be the leading Dutch insurance company, opening its first foreign agency in Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1857 and reaching branches across 139 locations worldwide by 1900. It later changed its name to De Nederlanden van 1845.
Two decades later, in 1863, the life insurance company Nationale Levensverzekerings Bank ("National Life Insurance Bank") was founded in Rotterdam. From 1932, the two companies cooperated on group insurance and pension insurance, and in 1938 De Nederlanden van 1845 acquired its first foreign insurer, De Vaderlandsche in Belgium. During World War II, the offices of both companies were bombed and 46 employees were killed. The two firms merged on 3 April 1963, to form Nationale-Nederlanden, combining the country's largest insurer with its second-largest. The new group expanded significantly internationally during the 1970s and 1980s, introducing its iconic orange N logo in 1970. In 1986, Nationale-Nederlanden expanded its portfolio to include the banking sector, becoming the sole owner of the struggling mortgage bank Westland-Utrecht Hypotheekbank.
From Wikipedia’s article on ING Group, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3