ING joins blockchain-based platform Forcefield to make post-trade commodity transaction processing cheaper, safer, and more efficient.

Now in its seventh year, The Innovators is an annual award of Global Finance magazine, honouring top innovations in areas such as payments, trade finance, cash management and islamic finance. Katana was recognised in the corporate finance category.

The Voltron initiative, built on R3’s Corda blockchain platform, has completed global trials which saw over 50 banks, including ING, and corporates participate in the simulation of multiple digital Letter of Credit transactions across 27 countries on six continents.

ING, together with ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas, Citibank, KfW IPEX-Bank and Societe Generale, has won the Deal of the Year Award 2018 for green ship finance by Marine Money.

From sustainable water technology to financing for electric vehicles, renewable energy and green buildings: ING supported multiple sustainability transactions in the first quarter of 2019. Many of these were sustainability finance ‘firsts’, as ING empowers clients to transition to a low-carbon economy.

“We’ve had a positive start to the year, with first-quarter results that show good commercial momentum,” said ING's CEO, Ralph Hamers.

Wind and solar investments could total US$13 trillion up to 2050 as power demand doubles, as revealed in a new analysis by ING Economics Department

5G refers to the fifth generation of mobile phone networks. It is expected to bring an exponential increase in data speeds that will change how users interact with the internet and applications. Read the ING report.

The ‘Bond Awards’ celebrate market leaders for thought-leadership and best practice in the rapidly developing green bond market. ING was awarded the top spot for its 12-year €1.5 billion and 7-year $1.25 billion green bond in November 2018.

Asia Pacific is at the beginning of a journey that will increasingly see environmental, social and governance factors considered alongside economic drivers when decisions are made by governments, corporates and citizens.

ING and the European Investment Bank provide Dutch shipping company Spliethoff with €110 million to make its fleet less polluting.

ING has won the ‘Socially responsible investing bond of the year’ award by International Financing Review (IFR) for its second green bond issuance. The money raised will fund a green loan portfolio of new and existing loans related to renewable energy and green buildings.

ING’s blockchain team has announced its newest cryptographic blockchain development: Bulletproofs. The code is an extension to previous releases that aimed to improve data privacy within distributed ledgers: zero-knowledge range proof (ZKRP) and zero-knowledge set membership (ZKSM).

On 6 February, ING published its FY2018 results, including a 4Q18 net result of €1,273 million, reflecting continued business growth at resilient margins, higher net commission and fee income, and lower risk costs.

The stand-out characteristics of a Bank Mendes Gans (BMG) solution for Ingram Micro made it an indisputable winner of the Best Multi-Currency Liquidity Solution accolade in TMI’s Awards for Innovation & Excellence 2018.

ING’s global lead for water projects, Ambika Jindal, has been appointed to lead the Dutch government’s Valuing Water Initiative programme for the coming three years.

'Trade Finance Global' spoke to ING's DLT program director Mariana Gomez de la Villa on distributed ledger technologies (DLT) and trade finance, evaluating some of the real world applications of blockchain in trade finance.