ING has announced it will make an investment in London-based provider of natural language processing (NLP) technology, Eigen Technologies (Eigen).

The €4.5m investment, made through the bank’s venture capital arm ING Ventures, is part of Eigen’s Series B investment round announced in November 2019 joining other investors including Goldman Sachs, Temasek, Lakestar and Dawn Capital.

With Eigen, ING will work on establishing best-in-class NLP models fully tailored to the financial industry’s need for data extraction. Both companies aim to speed up the development of use cases in areas such as trade finance and SME banking.

Benoît Legrand, ING’s chief innovation officer and CEO of ING Ventures said Eigen provides a strategic capability in use cases across both retail and wholesale banking:

“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.”

Advanced thinking

“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,” commented Dr Lewis Liu, co-founder and CEO of Eigen Technologies.

Eigen’s NLP technology is already used by ING in areas such as LIBOR transition and loan operations.

ING’s investment was part of an overall series B investment for Eigen Technologies of US$42m.