ING has invested €4.5 million in Eigen, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology company.

The Dutch banking giant said the funding - made through the bank’s venture capital arm ING Ventures - is part of Eigen’s $42 million Series B investment round announced in November 2019 joining other investors including Goldman Sachs, Temasek, Lakestar and Dawn Capital.

Headquartered in London, Eigen uses NLP technology to help companies extract data from documentation. It will work with ING to establish NLP models targeted at solving data extraction challenges for the financial services industry.

The strategic investment comes after a successful client partnership between the two companies. Eigen’s technology is already used by ING in areas such as LIBOR transition and loan operations.

Benoît Legrand, ING’s chief innovation officer and chief executive 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,” he said.

Eigen Technologies co-founder and chief executive 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.”

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