ING Bank Launches Developer Portal for Corporate Clients And Fintechs

Mark Buitenhek, ING’s global head of Transaction Services
Mark Buitenhek, ING’s global head of Transaction Services

Developer portals are becoming a widely accepted approach by banks to accelerate innovation as it promotes new dynamics with external developers. ING Bank has joined the group of financial institutions adhering to open banking initiatives by launching the first version of its Developer Portal.

 

The portal opened by ING provides developers access to selected, simulated ING application programming interfaces (APIs) they can use to jointly create new and innovative customer experiences. It is in the spirit of open banking that the bank launched the Developer Portal a global marketplace for developers from inside and outside the bank.

 

Mark Buitenhek, ING’s global head of Transaction Services, said:

 

“We look forward to increasing choice and value for our customers through a collaborative developer ecosystem.”

 

This marketplace for developers includes the participation of corporate clients and fintechs who want to partner with ING to create new, empowering initiatives for customers.

 

The APIs will be made available in a ‘sandbox’ and facilitate the new European Payment Services Directive (PSD2). The ‘sandbox’ is a test environment, which contains dummy data and functionalities. The initial simulation APIs offered in the Developer Portal include ‘Account Information Services’, ‘Payment Initiation’, and ‘Payment Request’. ING commits itself to continuously expand the portal’s functionalities and the APIs it offers.

 

Ron van Kemenade, Chief Information Officer at ING
Ron van Kemenade, Chief Information Officer at ING

Ron van Kemenade, Chief Information Officer at ING, commented:

 

“By making it easy for our internal developers to access our APIs we accelerated the bank’s digitization globally. We are excited to expand this capability to our clients and selected third parties.”

 

ING Bank was recently involved, together with HSBC, in a successfully executed live trade for international food and agriculture conglomerate Cargill using R3’s Corda scalable blockchain platform. The end-to-end trade was completed on a single shared application rather than multiple systems, which demonstrates blockchain as a solution that promotes digitization and efficiency while being commercially and operationally viable. The blockchain-based transaction was processed in 24 hours, while a legacy system would take between 5 and 10 days.