Frankfurt am Main, 12 May 2022 - ING is the world’s first bank to start a pilot project on embedding ESG criteria in Financial Markets pricing in an automated way. The bank has started this pilot in Germany whereby price quotations no longer depend exclusively on internal credit ratings and profitability ratios, but also on the current ESG performance of corporate customers. The bank is making a start with its automated e-FX trading as part of this pilot project, and other asset classes such as interest rates will follow suit.
"With this step, we will make adjustments for our corporate clients reflecting their ESG ambitions," says Thomas Epple, Head of Financial Markets Germany & Austria, who heads the pilot project at ING Germany "We are changing our entire model so that customers with a favorable ESG profile will receive a better price."
ING experts from the Financial Markets and Sustainable Finance departments created a framework that measures the ESG performance of each client. "We are convinced that we can further inspire the market with this advance and foster our strategy to generate more business with sustainably positioned companies," adds Eddy Henning, member of the management board of ING Germany and Head of Wholesale Banking. "The ultimate goal is that these companies apply similar concepts into their financing strategy and hence, favor sustainable banks as partners."
ING Germany expects its innovation to have a positive impact on markets to integrate sustainability considerations in day-to-day operations.
ING in Germany
With over 9 million customers, we are the third largest bank in Germany. Our core products are current accounts, mortgages, savings, consumer loans and securities. For lending to small and medium-sized companies, we work together with the online platform Lendico in the Business Banking segment. In the wholesale banking segment, we offer banking services for large, international companies. With over 6,000 colleagues, we are represented in Frankfurt am Main (headquarters), Berlin, Hanover, Nuremberg and Vienna.