The ING Group announces that it is working with the Dutch financial regulator AFM on a DeFi P2P lending project.
Most people probably know the bank with the orange lion from the advertisement with Dirk Nowitzki. Now Annerie Vreugdenhil, Head of ING Neo and Chief Innovative Officer of ING, announced at the Singapore FinTech Festival a current DeFi project. Vreugdenhil casually explained to all the actors present from the financial world that the ING Group would be working on a DeFi P2P lending project together with the Dutch financial regulator AFM. According to the Financial Stability Board, ING is a systematically important financial institution. That is why the big bank is subject to special requirements. These include strict monitoring and a high level of equity. It is therefore all the more exciting that ING is taking on blockchain and co.
DeFi project for private customers
Even if no specific offers or suggestions have currently been developed, Vreugdenhil said at the SFF: “In Amsterdam we just have a DeFi initiative for P2P lending, on which we are starting to work together with the supervisory authority.” However, she made it clear that the ING will not rely on any Bitcoin collateral:
We check peer-to-peer lending in a kind of DeFi concept. But then not with bitcoins. What is interesting for us is how to create peer-to-peer credit or open credit options with different types of collateral. There are various options for hedging instead of using volatile Bitcoin.
Annerie Vreugdenhil
The CIO also emphasizes that the DeFi project would be aimed at the “hungry” private customers. Because “corporate customers are much more critical of such things because they simply cannot afford them. It is not their business to be speculative ”.
Lending protocol Aave and the big bank
The ING Group wants to become part of the crypto ecosystem has been at the latest since the publication of the White papers “Lessons Learned from Decentralized Finance” in spring 2021 clear. In it, ING assesses the DeFi properties and comes to the conclusion that the “best” of the centralized and decentralized financial offers could be achieved if they would cooperate. Theoretically, ING tested this with Aave. This is a permissionless, peer-to-peer credit protocol. At the time of the deliberation, their developers were already working on the implementation of a permissioned credit pool that was explicitly aimed at institutions.
You can find out how Aave works, what the special features are and why it is particularly interesting for banks (in the last third) of the following article:
In (insufficient) brevity, the concept can be explained by saying that Aave offers to award interest on over-secured crypto assets without the need for intermediaries, since smart contracts coordinate the loans. Whether Aave is included in the current project was not explained at the Fintech Festival.
Pyctor for custody of digital assets
Another big project that ING is working on bears the name Pyctor. What sounds like a James Bond villain is actually a platform for custody of digital assets. As a decentralized custodian, it targets security tokens on public and private blockchains. Other project participants are among the largest global wealth custodians: State Street, Citi and BNP Paribas Securities Services (BNPPSS). ABN AMRO, Invesco, Société Générale – Forge, UBS and others are also involved in the project.