ING's Q3 2026 Results: Restructuring Charges and the Buyback to Watch

ING publishes its third-quarter 2026 results today, Thursday 29 October, at 7:00 am. The figures land after a year of restructuring charges tied to its Wholesale Banking workforce.

The first step came on 2 August 2025, when ING announced a restructuring of the Wholesale Banking workforce. The bank's fixed income presentation from 31 July 2025 put the incidental expenses at €85 million, tied to approximately 230 redundancies. Incidental expense items are one-off costs that sit outside the business's core running costs, so they are reported separately.

The scale of the programme appears to have widened. In October 2025, CEO Steven van Rijswijk said the bank may cut 950 jobs in its home market by the end of 2026. The two figures measure different things: 230 redundancies in one division, against a possible 950 across the Dutch home market. Only the first has been booked as a cost in reported results so far, and the second is framed as a possibility, not a completed decision.

In its fourth-quarter 2025 results, ING reported €104 million in incidental expense items, primarily restructuring provisions for planned full-time equivalent (FTE) reductions. A provision is an amount set aside on the balance sheet for a cost the bank expects to pay later. The profit hit arrives first, while the cash leaves over time. Severance is paid over subsequent months, so the income statement and the cash flow statement can tell different stories for several quarters.

That timing matters for reading today's release. A provision booked in one quarter can be released, topped up, or drawn down the next, so quarter-on-quarter comparisons of incidental items say less about the programme's end point than the headline totals suggest.

ING has used this mechanism before. On 21 December 2021, the bank said its decision to quit French retail banking would result in a restructuring provision in its fourth quarter of 2021.

Investors tracking the Wholesale line will want to see whether the 2026 charges follow the same arc of provision, utilisation and eventual release, or whether the planned reductions grow.

Capital returns form the other thread. On 30 April 2026, ING Groep launched a €1 billion buyback (about $1.2 billion, per Reuters) on the same day it reported quarterly profit above expectations. The programme began on 30 April 2026 and was expected to end no later than 26 October 2026. The European Central Bank approved it.

A buyback reduces the number of shares outstanding. That lifts per-share measures such as earnings per share and tangible book value per share (the bank's net asset value per share, excluding intangibles), all else equal.

For a bank carrying restructuring charges, that pairing is worth watching: a cost base cut through headcount reductions, alongside a capital return funded from earnings. Whether the buyback's completion appears in today's release, and at what total, will show how the two have been balanced.

The 2021 French exit and the 2025 to 2026 Wholesale programme are not the same event, and the sizes differ by an order of magnitude. Both follow the same accounting sequence: announce, provision, then carry the cost through later periods.

For the Wholesale programme, the open questions for today are concrete. Will the Q3 2026 results add to the incidental expense line? Does the home-market reduction get a firmer number? And does the buyback's progress, reported in the most recent company update dated 27 October 2026, change the picture of capital deployment? The 7:00 am release should answer the first two. The third depends on the detail in the filings, not the headline.