Malik, customer journey expert fraud management

Malik knows that moment of doubt better than most. As a customer journey expert specialising in fraud management, he joined ING as an external consultant, and ended up, together with his team, at the centre of something the Belgian market had never seen before: a feature that lets customers instantly verify whether the person calling them genuinely works for ING.

An unexpected place to end up

Malik’s path to ING was anything but conventional.

With a background in criminology, financial crime, and cybercrime, the financial sector was never part of the plan. But when the opportunity came to apply that knowledge to a real customer problem, something shifted.

"I never imagined I would work in the financial sector. But at ING, you quickly realise that banking is about much more than money; it’s about protecting people,” says Malik.

What convinced Malik to stay was the way ING made room for his perspective, even from well outside the banking world. The team was genuinely open to learning from someone who had studied how criminals think.

Building something no one had built before

Developing Check the Call meant working across teams that don’t always speak the same language: risk specialists, compliance experts, IT developers, customer journey designers, and the marketing and communications team. Malik’s role was to bridge those worlds - translating fraud patterns into requirements that developers could build and customers could actually use. The goal was clear: secure, but simple.

“A protection tool only works if people understand it immediately,” Malik says. “If the process feels complicated, people won’t use it, and then it protects no one.”

His biggest learning? How much communication shapes the outcome of a security measure. The marketing team’s involvement turned out to be decisive: they helped frame the feature in a way that felt reassuring rather than alarming.

A problem that keeps evolving

Check the Call is a first step, not a final answer.

Fraud patterns shift constantly, and Malik’s criminology background has taught him to expect that. At ING, that mindset fits well: the bank gives teams the space to keep iterating, to follow where the threats go, and to involve the right people at each stage.

“Criminals adapt very quickly,” Malik says. “That means fraud prevention will remain one of the most important pillars for banks in the years ahead, and I want to be part of shaping that.”

At ING, different backgrounds are an asset, not an obstacle. For Malik, that made all the difference. The result - a feature that gives customers back a sense of control in a moment of vulnerability - is one he is proud to have helped build.