[Scoundreller]

ING Direct's parent, the dutch ING, fell on hard times during the 2009 recession.

So ING sold it off to The Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS).

Canada's bank-friendly anti-consumer policy meant that ING Direct had some value, and BNS coughed up the most cash.

They were only allowed to use the orange ING branding for a few years, so they changed it to something that was borderline familiar: an orange fruit.

BNS probably had to, or chose to, switch ING clients over from the Dutch back-end to their Canadian one.

[jeromegv]

6 character limit was already there during ING Direct years. Possible they were using the old Dutch systems but i find it a tad surprising, they would have needed to set it up from scratch in Canada (as I don’t think anything was stored in Netherlands). So they purposely setup an old-ass system in the 90s. What a shit show

[graeme]

Plausible, but they had six digit codes from the beginning.