ING Bank and Obelisk Support: Over a decade of flexible legal partnership

Client Profile: ING

ING Bank is a major international financial institution headquartered in the Netherlands, known for offering a wide range of retail and commercial banking services. It operates across Europe and other regions, focusing heavily on digital banking, which allows customers to manage accounts, payments, savings, and investments through streamlined online and mobile platforms.

ING has built a reputation for simplifying banking through user-friendly technology and transparent financial products, serving millions of customers worldwide while continuing to expand its presence in sustainable finance and innovation-driven banking solutions.

The Challenge: High quality and scalability

ING Bank’s UK legal team needed reliable, high-quality legal support that could scale up and down quickly, without the overhead of permanent hires or the friction of starting fresh every time.

Quality was non-negotiable. ING’s work spans complex lending transactions, acquisition finance, and projects deals – areas where a lawyer who takes three weeks to become useful is, in practice, too expensive regardless of their day rate. The team also needed genuine flexibility.

What Obelisk did

Obelisk’s relationship with ING began as overflow support -a UK-based finance lawyer working remotely, available to absorb peaks and cover absences. That lawyer became, in the client’s own words, part of and an asset to the team.

Over time, the relationship grew into longer-term interim cover. By 2025 and 2026, Obelisk was sourcing candidates for maternity cover roles within ING’s lending services legal team, drawing on consultants with backgrounds from magic circle law firms or with significant finance in house experience.

Obelisk also helped ING solve a problem no other provider would attempt: when a lawyer they valued needed to work from the Netherlands, Obelisk found a structure that made it work.

Why the relationship is a lasting one

Adrian Marsh is direct about what Obelisk does differently. Quality comes first. Obelisk’s acceptance rate of under 20% of applicants is not a marketing claim; it is what allows a client like ING to trust that what arrives will be worth having.

Flexibility comes second, but it matters just as much in practice. Obelisk’s model is built around lawyers who want to work a certain way and clients who genuinely accommodate that. What ING found when they tested competitors was that those competitors said they offered flexibility but could not actually deliver it.

The third thing is accessibility. Adrian put it plainly: if there is a real problem, he can pick up the phone to resolve it. It is what being a smaller, client-focused business makes possible -and ING values it.

The interim opportunity

The ING relationship illustrates the difference between offering overflow and interim solutions, and why the distinction matters for clients in the banking sector.

Overflow is reactive: it absorbs what the team cannot handle. It is valuable, and for many of our clients it is where the relationship begins. But interim is something different. A consultant on a 12-month assignment knows the systems, the policies, the deal team, and the client’s expectations. They do not need to be reintroduced to the work every few months. The investment in onboarding pays off across the whole assignment, and the quality of support in month ten is better than it was in month one.

For ING, the question was not whether to use overflow or interim in the abstract. It was what the legal team actually needed to function well. The honest answer, which Obelisk was able to deliver, was both. The right conversation with any banking client is about what continuity, quality, and genuine flexibility look like in their specific environment, and whether Obelisk can match that.

In ING’s case, the answer has been yes for over a decade.