ING's advanced analytics tool that helps portfolio managers to make faster and sharper investment decisions is to become a London-based standalone company called Katana Labs. ING Ventures will provide a £1.5 million scale-up loan as part of a £3 million funding round, and sell a majority stake in Katana to third-party investors.

Katana learns from the history of hundreds of thousands of trades and translates this into a prediction or suggested decision for the trader.

"A growing number of clients are discovering the advantages of using advanced analytics in decision-making. It enables them to work faster and more efficiently," said Santiago Braje, CEO of Katana and former head of Credit Trading at ING.

"Supported by ING Labs, we developed, tested and validated the technology. Now it's time to move to the next phase as an independent fintech. We are very excited about the opportunities we see in developing our platform and expanding our client base." Man and machine

Named after the ultra-sharp Samurai sword, Katana uses predictive analytics to help traders decide what price to quote when buying and selling bonds for their clients. This is based on historic and real-time data.

By organising and displaying predictions along relevant data in a way that can be intuitively absorbed by the trader, Katana is designed to complement the trader's own decision-making.

In 2018, ING launched Katana Lens, an improved version of the tool developed for the buy-side (investors) of the bond market. It uses an algorithm that learns from the history of hundreds of thousands of trades and identifies the most promising ones. By going through all the pairs of bonds and taking each 'buy' and 'sell' combination as a possible investment, it simplifies the selection process for investors, who are presented with a prediction or suggested decision.

"In the past few years, Katana has managed to grow from an internal innovation project to a serious value proposition for bond investors. We attracted major clients who see the added value of this super smart AI-tool. I'm proud that with our support Katana grew out to a fully-grown fintech that is ready for an independent future," said Annerie Vreugdenhil, head of Innovation at ING Wholesale Banking.

Katana was developed by ING's Financial Markets Global Credit Trading team in London and the bank's Wholesale Banking Advanced Analytics team. The teams tested and validated the technology within ING Labs. Katana named Innovator 2019

Katana was named as an Innovator 2019 by Global Finance magazine. The Innovators is an annual award honouring top innovations in areas such as payments, trade finance, cash management and Islamic finance. Katana was recognised in the Corporate Finance category.

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