ING, the Dutch bank, has announced that it has signed a £274m, 7 year deal with UK outsourcing supplier Astron, reports Computer Weekly.

Covering the IT infrastructure for the processing of banking and insurance documents, the deal will see 800 ING employees transferring to Astron as part of its ongoing restructuring, which it announced last November.

The restructuring will eventually see 2,200 employees outsourced in an effort to make annual savings of £158m.

ING is using a number of suppliers to outsource its IT, an approach it announced at a Gartner conference in London following an extensive evaluation of its IT infrastructure.

Dirk Karl, the man in charge of the strategy for ING said, "The traditional one-party approach to outsourcing cannot fully address our needs. With only one supplier, there is no internal benchmarking or competition. There is also a danger that proprietary or custom solutions will not be flexible or interoperable enough.

"Standardisation and commoditisation of core systems is, we think, more likely to offer a long-term solution."

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