Dutch multinational banking and financial services corporation ING has signed a five-year licencing contract with New York-based distributed database tech firm R3, wherein the former will have access to the latter’s commercial blockchain platform Corda.

As part of the agreement, the Dutch banking giant will acquire unlimited licences for the Corda Enterprise platform, with an aim to use Corda’s decentralised applications (CorDapps) across its global business infrastructure. CorDapps offers a variety of financial services pertinent to banking activities that involve trade finance, insurance, identity, and capital markets.

Being a long-time partner of R3, ING has been enterprising the blockchain technology for some time now. In was in November 2018, when ING participated in the first live trade of the Corda-powered Voltron trade project, and jointly completed the first live transaction in securities on the Corda Enterprise platform in March 2018. ING, along with other multinational banks, successfully completed a live commercial paper transaction in the same year, based on the Corda-powered tool named Euro Debt Solution.

In Germany, Deutsche Bundesbank and capital market firm Deutsche Börse announced in October they had jointly completed performance tests of their specified prototypes for securities settlement that were developed on the Hyperledger Fabric (version 1.0) and the Digital Asset Platform. These prototypes support the settlement of securities transactions, payments, interest payments and repayments at the maturity of a bond. The testing, which was conducted during the second half of 2018, showed capabilities for the productive operation of a realistic financial market infrastructure that could also serve as a basis for further development.

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