Dutch banking giant ING signs five-year deal with blockchain startup R3

Dutch banking and financial services giant ING Bank has signed a five-year deal with enterprise software firm R3.

Under the agreement, the bank would be entitled to an unlimited number of licenses for Corda Enterprise, R3’s commercial blockchain platform.

Introduced in July 2018, Corda Enterprise is a commercial distribution of Corda, R3’s open source blockchain platform. It has been designed to meet the demands of modern-day businesses.

With this deal, ING will be able to access Corda Enterprise across locations and deploy production-ready CorDapps (Corda apps) across a wide range of business areas.

“CorDapps in production on Corda Enterprise cover a wide range of financial services activity including trade finance, identity, insurance and capital markets. Through this deal, ING will be able to adopt CorDapps across business areas within ING, enabling the wider adoption of Corda Enterprise,” the release said.

ING Bank joined R3 blockchain consortium back in 2015, the year when the buzz around blockchain technology was started growing.

David E. Rutter, CEO of R3, said that the bank was involved in the first live trade on Project Voltron as well as the first live securities lending transaction on blockchain through HQLAx.

“Strengthening our partnership, by signing this licencing agreement, marks a huge milestone towards empowering clients to transition to a distributed economy. We are one step closer to deploying live DLT solutions for our clients with the supported infrastructure in place,” Annerie Vreugdenhil, Head of Innovation for wholesale banking at ING, said.