I'm indebted to this article by Tim McAlpine on the Currency Marketing blog, who discusses an interview with CEO of ING Direct USA, Arkadi Kuhlman -the "self-professed bad-boy of banking".ING Direct USA have no CRM system, do not segment customers or analyse profitability. They just want to win respect with repeated transactions - not a "relationship". With only a website, a call centre, consistent marketing and a simple value proposition they have grown to 7,000,000 customers in seven years.But they practice tough love: Apparently ING Direct will close your account if you make a fuss or want special treatment. They sack 5000 customers a month.Despite this (or perhaps because of the clarity of this simple model) has a 60% Net Promoter Score. Surely a record in this sector?It shows that if you set expectations up front to customers and deliver on promises you can score highly. Interesting personally for me as our business account is with ING, and my personal banking is with the Dutch "peoples bank" PostBank (which was taken over by ING in the last couple of years). As it happens, the PostBank is pretty good, but customers are already grumbling that ING will close branches and run services down... so we'll see what happens in this space.