An Internet bank plans to open an Internet cafe in Waikiki.

ING Direct, the branchless Delaware-based savings bank, said it will open an Internet cafe with a coffee bar in the former Local Motion building in September at 1958 Kalakaua Ave.

The cafe will be the seventh for ING Direct, which has attracted $80 billion in savings deposits from 6.5 million Americans since the bank was established eight years ago by Netherlands-based financial services giant ING Groep NV.

Coffee bars in recent years have been a strategy explored by the banking industry to draw more customers into branches with offerings from mobile coffee carts to Starbucks stores with lounge seating.

ING Direct cafes, which offer free Internet access, are more of an attempt to promote a brand and convey to consumers that the online bank is real.

The company said its cafe business inadvertently hatched in 1997 when customers of a new ING bank-by-phone business in Toronto started visiting the bank's call center office.

With no tellers to meet with customers, ING began serving coffee to visitors and later created a coffee kiosk in the building's lobby while customers waited to speak to a representative by phone.

In 2001, ING Direct partnered with Peet's Coffee & Tea to open its first U.S. cafe in New York. Other locations followed in Chicago; Los Angeles; Philadelphia; St. Cloud, Minn.; and Wilmington, Del.

Because managing or opening an ING Direct account is conducted online, the cafes don't handle cash transactions, except for sales of coffee and other merchandise that includes bank-branded items from $5 T-shirts to a $380 folding bicycle.

Cleo Brown, head of ING Direct operations in Hawai'i, said the Waikiki cafe also would like to sell a variety of products from local manufacturers including cookies, chocolates, art and surfboards.

The second floor of the cafe building will house meeting and conference facilities where ING Direct plans to hold educational seminars. The meeting facilities, Brown said, also will be available to small businesses and nonprofit organizations for financial literacy events.

"Our mission is to lead Americans back to saving," she said.

Of course, acquiring new customers is also the goal of the cafes, which are staffed by employees who are on hand to explain the online bank's deposit and loan products. In some cafes, the menu includes coffee and food items as well as bank account options.

"We believe saving money should be as simple as having a cup of coffee," the company says on its Web site. "So we invite you to come in and experience just how refreshing it is to sip a latte, surf the Internet for free and talk to us about how we can help you save your money."

ING Direct said it has about 20,000 customers in Hawai'i, up from about 10,000 two years ago.

Brown said ING Direct also plans to launch a mobile cafe, a 40-foot RV converted to provide coffee, Internet access and financial savings information as an additional way to reach out to the local community.