ING Bank has signed a major five-year deal with enterprise software firm R3, entitling the bank to an unlimited number of licenses for R3’s commercial blockchain platform, Corda Enterprise. The deal will allow ING to roll out access to Corda Enterprise throughout the bank globally and deploy production-ready CorDapps 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.

Corda Enterprise is a commercial distribution of Corda, R3’s open source blockchain platform, designed specifically to meet the demands of modern-day businesses. Leveraging the unique features of Corda—privacy, consensus, interoperability, ease-of-integration—Corda Enterprise offers additional features targeted at the needs of large and complex organisations, such as the world’s only Blockchain Application Firewall, 24/7 support, dedicated product management and support for industry-standard enterprise databases.

In addition to taking a proactive position on blockchain technology, ING has built a reputation widely as a leader in innovation in finance. It has built a large team exploring the benefits of technologies including blockchain, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things.

Annerie Vreugdenhil, Head of Innovation for wholesale banking at ING, said: “Our longstanding joint journey with R3 has proven that this is the most mature enterprise DLT solution to serve the needs of the financial service industry. 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.”

David E. Rutter, CEO of R3, said “ING has been an enthusiastic adopter of blockchain technology and a valued long-term partner to R3. For example, in trade finance, it was involved in the first live trade on Project Voltron. It was also one of the participants in the first live securities lending transaction on blockchain through HQLAx. 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.”