Dutch Bank ING Considers DeFi Lending Project

Multinational banking and financial services corporation ING Group (NYSE: ING) is considering stepping into the decentralized finance (DeFi) lending industry. ING has been showing interest in the blockchain space for a while. The financial company was one of the new members that joined the Blockchain Education Alliance by blockchain accelerator MouseBelt in August 2020. At the time, MouseBelt said that ING and the other new companies had been utilizing the blockchain technology for about five years. ING has also started working on digital asset custody, and the company mentioned stablecoins development earlier this year.

Dutch Multinational ING Is Considering Entering DeFi Lending Industry

The matter of ING considering making a debut into the DeFi lending market was revealed by the company’s chief innovation officer, Annerie Vreugdenhil. Already, ING has commenced working with the Netherland Authority for the Financial Markets on a trial of its peer-to-peer DeFi lending protocol.

Vreugdenhil shed more light on the development in a presentation delivered at the Singapore Fintech Festival. The Festival began on the 8th of November with sponsorship from several prominent names in the crypto industry. The event, which is to end on the 12th of November, has support from the likes of Crypto.com, Mastercard (NYSE: MA), HSBC (NYSE: HSBC), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL), Payoneer (NASDAQ: PAYO), Western Union (NYSE: WU), and more.

The chief innovation officer said:

“We are looking into peer-to-peer lending in a DeFi kind of setup. But then not on Bitcoins. What is interesting to us is how you can probably create peer-to-peer lending or open up lending capabilities with different kinds of collateral. So with different ways of doing this rather than with volatile Bitcoin.”

ING noted the lending protocol Aave as one of the most recent innovations in the DeFi space. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, people can take out stablecoins loans while they use crypto as collateral. Aave also allows the borrowing and lending of stablecoins which addresses ING’s concern on volatile assets.

ING Stock Performance

Except for a decline of 2.21% in the last five days, ING stock has been pulling in gains for a year. ING has added nearly 84% in the last twelve months and increased 61.44% in its year-to-date record. Also, the company added 3.96% in the last three months and grew about 4% over the past month. At the time of writing, ING is at after-hours trading of $15.24.

In addition to ING’s growth, the company revealed that its mobile banking app had increased by over 5.3 million users. The bank conducted a survey to know how its mobile banking app is faring. According to the survey result, a majority of Dutch people use a mobile app to manage their banking activities