ING Bank Arms With R3 for Unlimited Access to Corda

ING is the Dutch banking and financial services group which has signed a five-year licensing deal with enterprise blockchain consortium startup R3 to access Corda commercial blockchain platform. The new is confirmed in a press release published on Jan 22.

ING Bank is all set to secure an unlimited number of licenses for Corda Enterprise platform, in order to deploy its blockchain tech and “production-ready” CorDapps across the global business infrastructure as a part of 5-years deal. R3 confirms the same on Tuesday. In July last year, Corda was launched by R3 after an effort of a whole year. Corda is an open-source blockchain platform which offers added features including 24/7 support, disaster recovery, blockchain application firewall, and many more.

Different financial services activities, such as trade finance, identity, insurance, and capital markets will be covered in CorDapps which is based on R3’s commercial platform as per the announcement made. By applying R3’s CorDapps, ING will in turn, purportedly contribute to the wider adoption of the consortium’s Corda Enterprise platform. CEO of R3 David Rutter said:

“As ING takes full advantage of access to Corda Enterprise, we look forward to seeing how the diverse CorDapp ecosystem can deliver gains in productivity, efficiency, and profitability across the bank’s diverse business areas.”

Annerie Vreugdenhil, head of innovation for wholesale banking at ING outlined that the 5-year agreement marks a “huge milestone” towards transitioning the bank’s clients to a distributed economy. “We are one step closer to deploying live DLT solutions for our clients with the supported infrastructure in place.”

In the month of December, ING along with three other European banks – Commerzbank, Natixis, and Rabobank did a live transaction of one-day maturity euro commercial paper worth €100,000 (or $1,13,432) on the Corda platform. In Feb 2018, ING along with BNP and Commerzbank successfully did a project of proof-of-concept for trade finance using R3’s blockchain technology.

R3 made an announcement last week that the launch of its Corda Network is all set to be monitored & managed by an organization called Corda Network Foundation recently founded a non-profit organization.