A chief executive usually answers to a board. Arkadi Kuhlmann added another audience: the people who worked with him. At ING DIRECT, he asked employees to vote on whether he should continue leading them. The ballot was secret. The question was personal. After a decade in charge, he was inviting an answer that a title alone could never supply.
It was a curious arrangement for a banker. The profession has plenty of ways to measure authority, most involving money, signatures and doors that open for some people more readily than others. Kuhlmann wanted a measure of belief. Did the staff still have faith in the mission, the company and him? A chief executive could deliver a speech about listening. He had arranged to receive a verdict.
That vote offers a useful entrance to his career. Kuhlmann helped build ING DIRECT in Canada and then the United States, turning an unfamiliar way of banking into a savings habit for millions. Along the way came orange branding, coffee shops, leadership books and a Harley-Davidson. The motorcycle makes a good photograph. The ballot gets closer to the question that kept occupying him: why should anybody follow?
A chief executive, subject to renewal
He described leadership as service. That sounds agreeable until someone asks what service requires of the person with the corner office. His employee vote gave the idea a practical consequence. People were being asked to help deliver a shared purpose; they could also assess the person claiming to represent it.
“Leadership is about service, and you can’t lead if you can’t follow.”
Arkadi Kuhlmann
Kuhlmann also took an unusual interest in setbacks when he met prospective colleagues. Rejection could be useful preparation for challenging an established industry. He wanted to know what a person had something to prove about. The polished résumé, with its uninterrupted procession of sensible choices, was only part of the interview.
His account of authority left room for a small joke at his own expense: sometimes things worked better when he was away. For someone arguing that employees should act on shared values, that is a rather desirable discovery. A culture that needs the chief executive standing beside every decision has an expensive attendance requirement.
Learning the rules, then removing a few
The unconventional banker had a conventional education in the machinery. Kuhlmann earned his HBA at Ivey in 1971 and his MBA in 1972. Teaching followed, then work in Canadian banking. Between 1977 and 1984, he held management and vice-president positions at Royal Bank of Canada. He learned an industry he would later ask customers to reconsider.
At Deak International, foreign exchange brought a wider geographical education. He later led North American Trust. These were businesses with systems, staff, customers and consequences. His eventual taste for simplicity came after years spent inside financial organizations. By the time ING entered the picture, he had experience of both building operations and changing ones already in motion.
He founded ING DIRECT Canada in 1996, developing its brand and recruiting its senior team. The public opening came in 1997. That distinction matters: before anyone could open a savings account, somebody had to assemble the company that would keep the promise. Kuhlmann served as its founding president and CEO through 2000.
The Canadian bank initially offered a no-fee, high-interest savings account without a branch network. Telephone service made the relationship possible; a website added online banking in 1999. Customers could deal with their money without making a trip to a teller. The institution asked them to accept an unfamiliar arrangement in exchange for a very familiar benefit: keeping more of what they saved.
A savings account with a point of view
In September 2000, Kuhlmann launched ING DIRECT in the United States. Its signature Orange Savings Account combined interest with no fees and no minimum balance. In a statement submitted to the Senate in 2005, he described a business with more than 2.5 million customers and over $43 billion in assets. The proposition had found an audience.
He gave that proposition a social ambition: encourage Americans to save. At a Thunderbird talk, he explained why the message could be hard to sell. Spending attracted attention. Saving was quieter. Yet he thought the emotional reward of watching a balance grow gave the bank something worth talking about. Orange became the conspicuous colour of a rather restrained activity.
From an early foothold to seven million customers by the end of 2008. US dollars; historical snapshots.
Six months after the American opening, the operation had 100,000 customers and $1 billion in deposits. By the end of 2008, those figures were seven million and $65 billion. Kuhlmann kept the service deliberately easy to understand, comparing its usability to getting into a car without first reading the manual.
There was a discipline hidden in the friendliness. A simple proposition gives a company fewer places to hide. Customers can remember what was promised. Employees can ask whether a proposed addition helps deliver it. The savings account became a way to explain the business to both groups, in language that did not require a glossary.
Coffee for the unconvinced
A bank without branches can still make people want to visit. Kuhlmann told a story about customers arriving at the Canadian operation’s Gordon Baker location to establish that ING actually existed. Staff offered them coffee. The visitors stayed. A question about trust had produced a small hospitality business.
The café idea gave direct banking a place for conversation. It is an appealingly human correction to an efficient model. A person may understand that a telephone connection can replace a counter and still prefer to look somebody in the eye. The cup of coffee gave that conversation time to happen.
By March 2011, Kuhlmann was announcing a planned San Francisco café with Mayor Edwin Lee. It would be the American bank’s eighth. The proposal included free Wi-Fi and space for entrepreneurs to work and meet, alongside conversations about saving. The venue at 101 Post Street was intended to make an abstract financial relationship feel like part of a neighbourhood.
For a business built around remote access, physical space had a specific job. It let people encounter the company on ordinary terms. You could ask a question, work for a while or have a drink. Banking had acquired the possibility of being somewhere you might willingly linger, which is a considerable assignment for a savings account.
The notes behind the orange
Inside ING DIRECT, Kuhlmann kept writing. A useful thought would become a paragraph or two on the staff’s internal dashboard. Over a decade, the messages accumulated. They supplied the material for Rock Then Roll, published in 2011. The writing started with colleagues who had work to do, long before it became a book for strangers.
He had already collaborated with branding consultant Bruce Philp on The Orange Code, which won the Industry category in the 2008 business book awards now run by Porchlight. Their subject was the connection between a company’s purpose, its brand and its behaviour. The argument had to account for an actual bank, with actual customers capable of noticing a discrepancy.
Kuhlmann’s next book took its title seriously: challenge something, then do the work of changing it. He directed its proceeds to the ING DIRECT Kids Foundation, whose activities included financial education. A book about the company’s shared effort would help support another part of that effort.
He also visited call centres and handled customer calls himself. His outside interests included painting, poetry, sailing and motorcycles. Those interests mattered to how he wanted colleagues to know him. “They don’t want to relate to a résumé,” he said. An executive biography has its uses. It is poor company over lunch.
Money learns to travel
Ownership changed in 2012. Capital One completed its acquisition of ING DIRECT USA in February, paying $6.3 billion in cash and approximately 54 million shares. Scotiabank acquired the Canadian operation that year. The Canadian bank took the Tangerine name in 2014, keeping orange as a visible connection to its earlier life.
Kuhlmann founded Zenbanx in July 2012. This time, the problem was money crossing borders. Customers could live in one country while supporting relatives, working or travelling in another. A financial life could involve several currencies even when its owner wanted to manage it from a single phone.
The proposed convenience was specific: hold, exchange, send and spend currencies through a mobile service. DUCA’s account of the Canadian venture described the difficulties faced by people establishing financial relationships after moving countries. For Kuhlmann, this was another place where everyday experience offered a question that existing arrangements answered awkwardly.
Zenbanx launched in Canada and the United States in 2015. SoFi acquired it in 2017. The acquisition announcement placed Kuhlmann on SoFi’s management team, leading development of new banking services. The subject had moved from a domestic savings habit to international money movement; his attention remained on the customer trying to get something done.
The next question is still about people
In 2024, Kuhlmann published Above the Clouds: Rediscovering the Power of Culture-Driven Leadership. It returned to the difficulty of identifying and sustaining a company’s culture under the pressure of daily decisions. The title suggests a little distance from the activity below, enough to see whether everyone is still travelling in the same direction.
His recent record also includes another executive assignment. A July 2026 filing for Captal, Inc., a company incorporated that year, identifies him as chairman and CEO. The banking career has continued to acquire new chapters alongside the books.
Yet the employee ballot remains an unusually revealing detail. It put an ordinary question inside an organization that had spent years asking customers to reconsider ordinary banking. Could the leader earn another year of belief? After the accounts, the acquisitions and the orange signs, Kuhlmann had left the people beside him a way to answer.