The investment was made through the bank’s venture capital arm, ING Ventures
ING Group invests in London-based NLP tech provider Eigen. (Credit: Wikipedia.org/Amin)
Dutch financial services company ING Group has announced an investment of €4.5m in London-based natural language processing (NLP) solutions vendor Eigen Technologies.
The investment was made through the bank’s venture capital arm, ING Ventures.
ING’s investment forms a part of Eigen’s Series B funding round of $42m announced in November 2019, which also included financing from Goldman Sachs, Temasek, Lakestar and Dawn Capital.
ING’s chief innovation officer Benoît Legrand said: “This partnership allows both companies to work closer together when implementing use cases through data and process analysis, so as to accelerate Eigen’s advantage in NLP as well as ING’s digital transformation.”
ING intends to use Eigen’s technology to develop NLP models
ING intends to use Eigen’s technology to develop NLP models for catering to the financial industry’s need for data extraction and for enhancing development across areas such as trade finance and SME banking.
ING has already employed Eigen’s NLP technology in areas including LIBOR transition and loan operations.
Eigen Technologies co-founder and CEO Dr Lewis Liu said: “In the years we have worked with ING we have found them to have some of the most advanced thinking in the market on the application of machine learning in financial services, something that comes from their fantastic innovation culture.
“To have ING join us as both an investor and strategic partner is a great privilege.”
Last November, ING had joined a $19.3m Series B funding round for US-based AI-based regtech Ascent.
Using machine learning and natural language processing, Ascent helps companies to build, manage and automate regulatory compliance.