ING Ventures and Unicredit have both invested €1.3m in Italian fintech start-up Axyon AI to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) for the syndicated loans market.
Image: ING invests in Italian AI start-up Axyon AI. Photo: Courtesy of ING.
Axyon AI will use the investment to accelerate the growth and development of its products.
Axyon AI’s SynFinance is an AI-powered platform that utilizes predictive analysis to find the investors who are most likely to take part in a syndicated loan.
ING said SynFinance play a key role when the financial data analysed to offer clients with advice can be complex and often fragmented, resulting in time-consuming process for banks.
Axyon AI CEO Daniele Grassi said: “Extracting value remains a painful manual process.
He continued saying: “We are excited to solve this problem through deep learning, an incredibly powerful branch of AI.”
SynFinance can review more than 300 potential investors and their likelihood to take part in a syndicated loan based on an algorithm that learns from various transactions, allowing banks to be more effective and offer better advice to clients.
ING chief innovation officer Benoît Legrand said: “ING Ventures is constantly looking for fintechs that help us to provide a differentiating experience for clients. We invest in companies that are of strategic relevance for ING to accelerate its strategy.
“Axyon AI is of interest because of its use cases in AI, which can bring value to financial institutions thanks to their predictive solutions.”
ING has collaborated with Axyon AI from 2016 and this is the second round of financing for the Italian start-up. Back in 2016, Axyon joined ING’s accelerator program and received start-up funding.
In October, the bank announced the launch of Katana Lens, an AI tool can help investors find and compare interesting trade ideas.
Katana Lens is a web-based application that uses predictive analytics, which claims to be helping bond investors in making faster and sharper decisions within minutes. It was co-created with Dutch pension fund PGGM.