Mark Beerens, senior product manager at ING, explores the transformative journey of API management at ING, as presented at the recent Kong API Summit 2025. Beerens provides insights on adopting microservices, a crucial step in modernizing ING's IT infrastructure, and discusses how the summit's themes align with the company's strategic goals.
In this video, Beerens shares their expertise in cloud API management and highlights strategic transitions at ING Private Cloud. Hosted by Nashawaty of theCUBE Research, the discussion emphasizes key themes from the summit and how ING navigates the shift from monolithic structures to a microservices-based landscape. Beerens details the cultural and technical challenges faced during this innovative transition.
Key takeaways include Beerens' emphasis on the importance of gradual implementation over a 'big bang' approach to microservices. According to Beerens and analysts at theCUBE, ING prioritizes empowering developers while managing complexities and skill gaps with the help of Kong's solutions. Beerens shares valuable lessons learned, advocating for awareness of both cultural and technical shifts during such transformations.
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Mark Beerens, ING Bank
Mark Beerens, senior product manager at ING, explores the transformative journey of API management at ING, as presented at the recent Kong API Summit 2025. Beerens provides insights on adopting microservices, a crucial step in modernizing ING's IT infrastructure, and discusses how the summit's themes align with the company's strategic goals.
In this video, Beerens shares their expertise in cloud API management and highlights strategic transitions at ING Private Cloud. Hosted by Nashawaty of theCUBE Research, the discussion emphasizes key themes from the summit and how ING navigates the shift from monolithic structures to a microservices-based landscape. Beerens details the cultural and technical challenges faced during this innovative transition.
Key takeaways include Beerens' emphasis on the importance of gradual implementation over a 'big bang' approach to microservices. According to Beerens and analysts at theCUBE, ING prioritizes empowering developers while managing complexities and skill gaps with the help of Kong's solutions. Beerens shares valuable lessons learned, advocating for awareness of both cultural and technical shifts during such transformations.
play_circle_outlineStrategic Gradual Transition: Prioritizing Microservices from Monoliths for Enhanced Efficiency through Effective Task Management and Technology Adoption
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play_circle_outlineRecognition of the importance of observability and automation in API usage.
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play_circle_outlineEnhancing Developer Productivity: KONG's Future in API Management, Analytics, and Service Mesh Innovations
In this conversation at the Kong API Summit 2025, theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty sits down with Mark Beerens, senior product manager for cloud API management at ING Bank, to unpack ING’s shift from a monolithic core to a flexible, microservices-powered landscape. Beerens explains how ING adopted a gradual, no-“big bang” approach: carving out services, sharing learnings across teams and re-skilling engineers while balancing culture and technology. He details why a hybrid cloud design (control plane on Azure, data planes on-prem) and developer “paved roads” ...Read more
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What approach did your company take in transitioning from a monolithic application to microservices, and what challenges did you face during this process?add
What role did KONG play in the transition to microservices for the API teams?add
What are the goals for your organization in the next year regarding API management, and how can KONG assist in achieving those goals?add
>> Welcome back to KONG API Summit 2025. My name is Paul Nashawaty. I am the practice lead and principal analyst at the AppDev practice for theCUBE Research, and I'm here coming to you live from the show floor of the event, and I'm joined today by Mark from ING. Mark, how are you doing?
Mark Beerens
>> I'm doing well. What about yourself?
Paul Nashawaty
>> I'm doing great, doing great. Why don't you introduce yourself, and a little bit about ING?
Mark Beerens
>> Sure. My name is Mark Beerens. I'm the happily married man, father of three-
Paul Nashawaty
>> Congrats....
Mark Beerens
>> and I've been working at ING for eight years now, the last three years as a product manager for cloud API management at ING Private Cloud. So as the name suggests, we are the cloud infrastructure for ING globally.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Awesome. Well, I am really excited to have you on. I mean, this show has been really... There's lot of buzz, the keynote was really exciting.
Mark Beerens
>> Very exciting. Yeah, indeed.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, lots of new announcements. What are your thoughts on the keynote?
Mark Beerens
>> It was awesome. It's so well-prepared, and I'm really looking forward to everything that KONG brings in terms of new functionality, but also in terms of the products that we are already using. So yeah, very excited to see what the rest of this event will bring.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, for sure, for sure. So we look at this API summit, we said this is a new generation of infrastructure at ING Bank, it's powered by microservices. What does that mean, powered by microservices? I mean, I know what microservices are, but what does it mean for you?
Mark Beerens
>> Well, it means that we're in the middle of a really big transition in our landscape. So if you look at the past, we had a big monolithic application, and we experienced some very severe issues with that setup, and that basically made us suffer in terms of scalability, but also in terms of complexity. And we just knew we had to fix it, and the way we went about it was to break the monolith down into separate scalable microservices, allow for more flexibility, and making us future-proof as a bank.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, I mean, well, you're one of the largest banks, I would say in the world that's out there, and in having these large monolithic infrastructures, it's hard, and it's essentially-
Mark Beerens
>> It is. Yeah.
Paul Nashawaty
>> It's hard to manage. A lot I talk about in my practice as an analyst, I talk about bridging the gap between old and news, so I talk about past, present, and future and what that means, and there's a lot of challenges when you look at bridging that gap between your monolithic applications, and then you're trying to move to a current state, which I would consider current state to be containerization or microservices, where you're going. What are your thoughts around moving away from the monolithic infrastructure? Again, can you share some of your biggest challenges that you had at ING Bank for this move?
Mark Beerens
>> Well, I think the first important distinction to make is cultural versus technical. So I would say that amongst the biggest technical challenges was, of course, adopting new technologies, and so where we previously were a centrally governed operations-based department, now we're moving away from that, and we're really developing those microservices with the same workforce, essentially, that we had when we had the monolithic application. So that was a really big shift towards containerization, but also topics like observability, authentication, authorization, we always needed to take that into account. And that also meant something for our workforce, so we needed to re-skill these people. And that's more on the cultural side of things, which was, I would say the hardest challenge for us.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, I mean, I see that in my research as well. I see that 67% of respondents in our latest research indicate that they're hiring generalists over specialists, not because they don't want to hire specialists, but they just can't find the specialists. And so there's challenges when you start looking at the ecosystem and the infrastructure, moving from heritage environments to this new containerized approach. What were some of the challenges? But not only the challenges, how did you prioritize which piece? I mean, given you have a bank, and you have to respond to your clients, how did you prioritize?
Mark Beerens
>> Basically, we adopted the strength, growth pattern, so we decided not to do a big bang approach. So we started carving out microservices from that big monolithic application, and then the learnings we took from those first teams we brought to the other teams.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Okay.
Mark Beerens
>> So we really had a gradual approach, also allowing for our engineers to re-skill and to adapt themselves to this new way of working. Because like I indicated before, it was really a cultural shift of great magnitude.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, I mean, cultural shift is one thing, changing the tech stack and up-leveling your skill is another, that's a big move. So was there a lot of turn in your company around that when people are moving from one tech stack to another, or is...
Mark Beerens
>> Yeah, well, I must say that we somewhat underestimated this whole transition. So you don't become an API developer overnight.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Right.
Mark Beerens
>> And also the cognitive loads for these people became quite high, so I just named a few things that they needed to gain experience with, and that's just something that doesn't happen overnight, right?
Paul Nashawaty
>> Sure.
Mark Beerens
>> So it did cause a lot of friction, but it was just something we had to do in order to make our landscape more future-proof.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah. And so enter KONG-
Mark Beerens
>> ....
Paul Nashawaty
>> so now we have Kong come into the equation, you want to modernize, you want to make your landscape more future-proof, like you're saying, you have skill gap challenges, so the complexity that these organizations like yourselves are running into are looking at vendors to solve these problems. So it's basically allowing for your teams to be more productive, more innovative, but solve the complexity, reduce the friction, and allow for modernization. So with that said, can you explain how KONG helped accelerate this kind of approach? I guess let's start with what products did you use from KONG to get you going?
Mark Beerens
>> Yeah, if you'll allow me, I'll take one step back.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Absolutely.
Mark Beerens
>> So when we started with this whole initiative, we had a whole list of requirements, but there were two that really stood out. So the first one was we needed a separation of concerns. So that meant in our case that we opted for a hybrid cloud implementation, with our control plane on Azure, and our data planes on our on-premises infrastructure, on our clusters. So that was one important topic. And the other one was that we really wanted to empower our developers. So we didn't want all the API teams to reinvent the wheel, so we wanted to have paved roads for them, and plugins from KONG really helped us gain that traction. So if you look at what KONG offers in terms of authentication, and authorization, and observability, and some of the other topics that I just mentioned before, that was really a key enabler for them to also speed up the process and not do all the heavy lifting themselves. So I would say that KONG was really a key enabler for this whole transition to microservices that we're still in the middle of.
Paul Nashawaty
>> So that was before this event, you were doing this all before this event, and there was a lot that was announced during this event. Do you see some of these announcements really helping accelerate your next generation, or your next efforts that you're doing?
Mark Beerens
>> Yes, for sure. I do feel that we first need to learn how to walk before we can start running. So like Marco also indicated during this keynote, a very mature API layer is necessary for the next steps, and to prepare you for the agentic era that we're now in the middle of. So we're still very much trying to up the maturity level-
Paul Nashawaty
>> Right....
Mark Beerens
>> of our API landscape, but in the meantime, we're also thinking about possible use cases for AI, because you cannot lag behind. That's not an option for us.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Right. I mean, that makes sense. And it's also being a bank, security is a big factor. You need to modernize your applications as you're moving forward. You also have a global entity, so you have regulations and compliance that are not just based in a specific region, but more global impacts. How is that taken into consideration as part of your modernization efforts?
Mark Beerens
>> Well, governance is, of course, a very big topic for us. And as a blue company, as a bank, we always need to put security first, so that's top of our mind. Globally speaking, there are regulations from different entities, so you have the European Union, European Bank, but also at the national level, and then within ING to top it off. So yeah, that's certainly something that we always need to be careful of. I wouldn't say it hampers innovation, but we always need to be mindful of adopting the right innovations-
Paul Nashawaty
>> Sure....
Mark Beerens
>> and being careful, because we do operate on people's financial data, and it's something we need to have in the back of our minds at all times.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, absolutely. And you have much more scrutiny than other organizations, because of being the financial impact of it. So let's talk about that. What lessons did you learn through this exercise, and what can you share with the audience on how other organizations can undertake some of these different initiatives like you did?
Mark Beerens
>> Well, I'm going to talk about this in my presentation as well. There are a couple of fundamental lessons that I want to convey. One is that every organization is different, and every engineer is different. So I talked a little bit about the re-skilling of the workforce that we have, it's always good to put yourself in the other person's shoes, and try to help them as much as you can. And of course, it's not only the task of the API management platform, like I said, the business unit I work for is called cloud API management, it's not just our platform, it's also things like an API-generator, so that the boilerplate code is generated for those APIs teams. So we're trying to help them in different ways.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Okay.
Mark Beerens
>> So that would be my first lesson, try to put yourself in the shoes of the people you service. .
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. And when we look at modernization, there's a lot of heritage environments that need to still be intact. Do you have a lot of that with the new systems of engagements that you use with these heritage applications, or do you-
Mark Beerens
>> What do you mean exactly by-
Paul Nashawaty
>> Like, a new application that's using maybe some of the heritage environments, using these APIs allowed to make those connections?
Mark Beerens
>> Yeah. So previously, we had this monolithic application that I talked about. Now, we're in the midst of moving to microservices. If you look at the consumption side of things, we have a new modernized UI that makes use of these microservices through our gateway, but we're also looking into automation. So the UI I talked about, it's mainly geared around click ops, so dev ops teams in different countries around the world ordering infrastructure, managing infrastructure, but we also want to make sure that they can use the same functionality through pipelines, for example. So that's a pivot in our consumption model.
Paul Nashawaty
>> So Mark, I'm going to ask you a question. We're here a year from now, we're in 2026, KONG API Summit, where do you want to see your organization, and how can KONG help you get there?
Mark Beerens
>> Well, we're looking at more functionality that we are adding to our API management solution. So we started off with our API gateway, and that's an excellent starting point, but we want to add more capabilities to it. So for example, one of those things would be analytics. So we have our own observability platform at ING that we offload things like metrics and such too. We really want to expand on that so that we can have things like predictive analytics. So in other words, if we see a spike in API calls, for example, that we can act immediately, not reactively, but proactively. That's one thing. A service mesh is something that we currently don't have, so all the traffic flows through our API gateway. There's still some room for improvement there. And of course, we know that KONG Konnect offers compelling solutions across the spectrum, really, so evaluating if it fits our requirements or not.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Mark, I'm really interested in understanding how this all comes together. I'm really excited to hear about this. Thank you for being on today. This is a lot of insights that you shared around how, not just ING is doing it, but how many organizations are working in this space, so it's really excited to have you on. And I want to thank you for watching our session today. I am Paul Nashawaty. I'm coming to you live from the show floor at the KONG API Summit 2025 on theCUBE, the leading source of tech news.
Paul Nashawaty