ING has contributed EUR4.5 million to a $42 million funding round in natural language processing vendor Eigen Technologies.
The investment, made through the bank’s venture capital arm ING Ventures, is part of Eigen’s Series B round announced in November 2019, which also included financing from Goldman Sachs.
Eigen’s NLP technology is already used by ING in areas such as Libor transition and loan operations.
The Dutch bank says it intends to further the use of the technology to develop NLP models tailored to the financial industry’s need for data extraction in areas such as trade finance and SME banking.
Benoît Legrand, ING’s CIO and CEO of ING Ventures says 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,” he says.