ING has announced a statutory net profit after tax of $440 million for 2019.

It’s a 9.7 per cent improvement on the previous year’s results.

A statement from ING said the earnings came with another year of record customer growth — with 423,000 new customers — and a 30 per cent increase in the number of Australians treating the bank as their main bank.

Now serving 2.6 million customers, ING reported that over the year it added more than 450,000 new everyday transaction accounts, while growing retail deposits by 9.9 per cent.

Personal loans surpassed $245 million, while the bank’s share of retail mortgages also grew, up by 6.3 per cent or $52 billion.

Commenting on the figures, ING Australia’s CEO, Uday Sareen, observed that “the growth of both retail deposits and retail mortgages has been above industry average as overall customer numbers continue to climb”.

“Savings and loans are the backbone of the business, but I have been particularly pleased with the growth of our consumer lending through personal loans and the Orange One credit card,” the CEO highlighted.

“We attracted more than 16,000 personal loan customers and developed a debt consolidation option — a good example of our customer-first approach to product design.”