ING has invested in securities lending platform HQLAx, which went live in December 2019.

The HQLAx application uses blockchain to facilitate efficient and high-speed trading of high quality liquid assets (HQLA).

ING and HQLAx partnered in 2018 to carry out the first ever live securities trade on a blockchain platform. Together with Credit Suisse, they swapped EUR 25 million worth of high quality liquid assets using the collateral lending application of HQLAx on R3’s Corda distributed ledger platform.

Under Basel III banks need to carry high quality liquid assets, which can easily and immediately be converted into cash. Efficient tradingusing HQLAx allows banks to optimise their balance sheets.

“HQLAx enables market participants to redistribute their collateral by exchanging the ownership of tokenised securities on Corda’s blockchain platform, which no longer requires the underlying securities to move across users. This removes settlement barriers and improves collateral fluidity, which in turn allows users to manage their liquidities easier, faster and more efficiently,” said Mariana Gomez de la Villa, head of ING’s blockchain team.