The CEO Who Turns Customers Away

Sept. 18, 2007 &#151 -- If Arkadi Kuhlmann had his way, cigarettes and liquor wouldn't be the only products with warnings. He would also put them at the end of all those warm and fuzzy bank commercials, a skull and crossbones on most mortgage applications and a big, fat caution sticker on the front of every credit card in your wallet.

"We're pushing them on college kids. We're pushing people over the edge, and we're basically giving them only half the story," Kuhlmann said. "There should be a warning sign on there that says 'this could cause death.'"

As CEO of the financial institution ING Direct, Kuhlmann is the rarest of bankers: He refuses to deal in customer-tempting mortgages and credit cards. He finds it immoral to make 21 percent interest on your next trip to the mall, and if you can't afford it, he doesn't want you to go to the mall at all. The only way to save this country, he says, is to save our money.

"I know you think you'll feel better if you buy a new shirt, buy a new blouse or go get your hair done because you're feeling down a bit, life's gotten to you," Kuhlmann said.

"But, the truth is, if you have $500 in your savings account, then you've got self-esteem, because that's the one thing you have control over. Buying a huge mountain of stuff, and then enslaving yourself to payments for it, and putting all of your relationships and everything at risk, is not a good formula."

Those are old-fashioned values for a CEO who rides a purple-and-orange Harley to the office, plays the video game "Guitar Hero" in one of the conference rooms and performs a bit of palm reading to break the ice with a new hire.

Kuhlmann's grandmother taught him that palm-reading trick, when he was an Eagle Scout with a paper route, saving every penny.

Before he quit teaching college economics and got into banking for the purest of reasons, "All these girls I was dating were like, 'You don't have any money. How are you going to take me out on a date?'"

But, even Grandma couldn't have foreseen the fortunes of Kuhlmann's current venture. In 2000, ING Direct was little more than a business plan on a napkin. The idea was to build a bank without branches and deal with customers only by mail, phone or the Internet.

Kuhlmann set out to build a fast-food model for banking by stripping away all the confusing frills and fees and passing the savings back to the customer.