Netherlands-based financing and banking services provider ING Bank has signed a licensing deal for a five-year period with R3. The licensing with the blockchain consortium startup is focused on the deployment of R3 Corda Enterprise platform.
According to an announcement by R3 on 22nd January, under the agreement, ING is entitled with an endless number of licenses for the Corda platform. This will enable the financial institution to use R3 blockchain technology as well as production-ready Corda Distributed Application (CorDapps) across ING global business operations.
CorDapps entails too many financial services activities which include, trade finance, insurance, identity, and capital markets, as per the announcement. Commenting on the deal, R3 CEO David Rutter said that with the deployment of Corda Enterprise by the ING, R3 would explore the areas in the banking sectors that can be benefited by the CorDapp infrastructure especially in terms of profitability, efficiency, and productivity.
The agreement is a major milestone towards moving the clients of the bank towards the distributed economy, as informed by the head of innovation for the wholesale banking sector at ING, Annerie Vreugdenhil. The financial institution is believed to be a step closer to using live DLT solutions for clients with the right ecosystem in place, said Vreugdenhil.
ING and R3 have partnered in the past as well. In December 2018, the financial institution together with three European banks – Natixis, Rabobank, and Commerzbank – entered a live transaction for a one-day maturity euro commercial paper valuing €100,000 (or $1,13,432) on the Corda platform.
The bank also successfully completed a proof-of-concept project in February 2018 in which BNP and Commerzbank also participated. The project was based on trade finance deploying the blockchain tech of R3.
The Corda Enterprise platform was launched by R3 in July 2017. It took R3 one year to develop the open-source blockchain platform. Corda can be deployed for added features such as 24/7 support, blockchain application firewall, disaster recovery, and more.
ING has recently taken a proactive move on blockchain technology as it has already established an identity of a global leader of innovation in finance. The group has a large team in place for exploring the advantages of technologies such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and blockchain.
ING is also said to be involved with commodity trade finance platform Komgo. The platform is powered by Quorum blockchain and is the JP Morgan version of Ethereum. The bank, lately, has been in news for a number of activities in the technology sector. It is reported to have become the founding member of a platform for the mining industry dubbed Minehub.
The move is similar to its strategic collaboration in the VAKT post-trade blockchain for energy. The development is focused on empowering the bank with the data to predict the direction as well as integration for trade finance. The bank has also made a significant contribution in Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) for the Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric platforms.
