PhillyDeals: ING Direct ordered sold by 2013

ING Direct Bank, based in Wilmington, is the biggest and richest of the "branchless" online banks that were supposed to take over American finance when they started 10 years ago in the dot-com boom.

With $92 billion in loans and investments and eight million accounts, it's now the largest U.S. savings bank.

But with interest rates low, savers are no longer mailing ING $1 billion a month in deposits, as they did before the 2008 financial crisis. Still, ING Direct is once again profitable, earning $250 million in the first half of 2010, after losing money in 2008-09 for its owners, the Dutch-Belgian conglomerate ING Groep NV, according to bank-regulatory records.

Like it? Buy it: "The European Commission has mandated that we be sold by 2013" as part of a move to break up large financial institutions, Arkadi Kuhlmann, the bank's leather-jacket-wearing, motorcycle-riding founder and president, told me in the cafe-lobby of his converted- warehouse headquarters on Wilmington's Christina riverfront.

"Anybody who wanted to buy this would have to write a pretty big check," he added. "We are in no rush."

Kuhlmann says he has been approached by big consumer and commercial lenders "looking for cheap retail funding. They all want to date us." He says he is holding off for a partner who would expand the business: "I'm looking for marriage."

Best of all would be to sell shares and become a public company, Kuhlmann says. "We want to be like Ikea, Costco, or Southwest," with their low-cost brands, he says. "I'm a fan of Charles Schwab," the discount brokerage, which competes with ING's ShareBuilder discount brokerage and savings plan, acquired in 2007 in the bank's only merger to date.

Schwab has disappointed its own shareholders in what has turned out to be a highly competitive business. But Kuhlmann says it has been great for customers who have enjoyed lower fees.

ING cuts costs by avoiding "brick-and-mortar" branches so it can charge lower home-loan rates, no checking fees, and higher savings-deposit rates - "half the revenue, one-third the cost," in Kuhlmann's formula.

ING rolled out what Kuhlmann calls a "vanilla" mortgage-lending business in 2004, just in time for the bubble in U.S. home prices and the rapid loss of value that led to record home foreclosures.

But he says his bank avoided losses by demanding investors borrow no more than 75 percent of the value of their homes. As a result, "our foreclosure rate is half a percent."

Shares of Radnor-based Qlik Technologies Inc. (pronounced "click") have jumped, from $10 at the user-friendly business-software-maker's initial public stock offering in July to more than $23 Wednesday, topping targets set by analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Jeffries & Co. Inc., and Stifel Nicolaus & Co. Inc. just last month.

Morgan's John DiFucci, in a recent report, says Qlik exploits computers' improved memory and processors to sell cheaper, easier-to-use business data crunching so salespeople and engineers can come up with rapid cost, price, and customer numbers, compared with rival systems bolted onto complex "enterprise software" systems by much larger makers such as International Business Machines Corp., Oracle Corp., and SAP AG.

Won't Big Software hit back? DiFucci says the industry is stuck in the "classic innovator's dilemma." Their expensive, complex, "highly profitable" enterprise software systems don't want to cut prices to compete with upstarts such as Qlik until "they are forced to." With $157 million in 2009 sales, "QlikTech does not provide a significant threat . . . yet."

"We want our end users to have an experience similar to Google, or Skype, or Facebook," Qlik chief executive officer Lars Björk told me. "I should be able to pick it up, understand it, feel in control." Users are urged to download personal copies of the software at Qlik's website, free, and pay license fees only when they share the data.

When Björk's not telling stories to investors, he is hiring engineers and sales managers to boost his 600-member worldwide staff, including a 50-person headquarters office at the Radnor Financial Center. He is seeking more space from landlord Brandywine Realty Trust.