The Postbank was a large Dutch bank, part of the ING Group. It had 7.5 million private account holders and was one of the largest providers of financial services in the country. It provided current and savings accounts, loans, mortgages, insurance, investments and pensions. As opposed to other banks, it had no branches but operated completely through land mail, telephone and online banking, although some operations have traditionally been available through post offices. It was founded in 1881 by the national government as the Rijkspostspaarbank . In 1986 it was privatised, together with the... Postgiro service, as the Postbank. A merger in 1989 with the NMB Bank led to the creation of NMB Postbank Groep, and a further merger with insurer Nationale Nederlanden in 1990 created the ING Group. On the 16th of May 2007 ING Group announced to merge its daughter ING Bank with Postbank to one single brand. The new organisation, launched in February 2009, is called ING and has approximately 8.3 million unique private account holders.
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