Capital One was the likely winner to acquire ING Direct's US business, and they did. Few people do data analytics better than Capital One and a large direct business such as that run by ING is a perfect customer pool upon which to use the analytics that they have wielded so successfully in credit cards. Capital One was experimenting with direct banking in some markets, including my home of San Jose. Half the ads I saw in my yahoo mail were for Capital One. Direct banking is like the credit card business in that they are branchless business which rely on outbound messaging and lots of experimenting around price and marketing techniques to make a successful venture. Capital One knows how to run such businesses. Nevertheless, this is a bold move by Cap One. They have assets of $129 billion and they are a acquiring a bank with $92 billion in assets. This vaults them into the top ten banks in the US. What do you think?