Scotiabank has rebranded its ING Direct Canada unit as Tangerine, as part of its agreement to buy the bank from Netherlands-based ING Group for $3.1 billion in late 2012.
"The change is effective today," Tangerine CEO Peter Aceto told Business in Vancouver April 8.
Aceto explained that the name is a good fit for the largely virtual bank because it is an unusual name for a financial institution.
"Our brand and what we are known for is being innovative," Aceto said. "We're distinctive and different from all banks in the country in how we treat customers and our value proposition with lower rates and fees. So, when we changed our name, we wanted to clearly differentiate ourselves in the marketplace again."
Another thing the bank is known for is the colour orange.
The colour tangerine is a dark shade of orange so some might think that it is not too big a leap for the bank to adopt a new dark orange colour for marketing materials.
That will not happen, though, Aceto said.
He believes that if the bank changed its colour as well as its name, the change may have been too drastic for customers.
"We didn't want to change everything because we wanted some stability and continuity," he said.
Tangerine has more than 1.7 million customers across Canada and more than 90% of the bank's transactions are virtual. It has two so-called "cafés" in Toronto as well as ones in Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal. Those brick-and-mortar locations are not bank branches, however. Instead they act more like marketing centres for customers to get information about how to transact business online.
Most of its business is in savings accounts but it also offers a no-fee chequing account, mortgages and mutual funds. There is no discount brokerage nor is the bank planning to create one. The next big initiative for the bank will be to release a Tangerine credit card in 2015, Aceto said.
About 13% of ING's clients are in B.C., or about 222,000.
Compared to the rest of Canada, British Columbians are more likely to have non-registered accounts and less likely to have investment accounts with Tangerine.
