ING Bank Developed Protocol Which Tracks Crypto Transfers

The Netherlands-based ING bank developed a protocol which would allow institutions to track crypto transfers. The protocol has been developed with the Financial Action Task Force’s Travel Rule requirement for crypto exchanges and firms that are dealing with cryptocurrencies.

One of the key things to note in the blockchain news now is that this protocol is FATF-friendly and was initiated by ING Bank. The protocol is dubbed the Travel Rule Protocol (TRP) and has also been backed by other big banks such as Standard Chartered, Fidelity Digital Assets as well as BitGo, plus a range of other firms in the crypto space.

As you probably know, all of this comes on the heels of the FATF’s recommendation in October 2018 which said that including virtual asset service providers (VASPs) in the scope of its anti-money laundering (AML) mandate is a must. This is what gived birth to many technical solutions and a messaging standard.

Hervé Francois, a Blockchain Initiative Lead on Digital Assets at ING told the crypto news media the following:

“ING, as an innovation leader on blockchain/DLT, sees increasing opportunities with regard to Digital Assets on both asset-backed and native security tokens. With a regulatory first approach, we are actively involved in different working groups to support standardization of this emerging ecosystem and ultimately pioneer mass adoption.”

Now that ING Bank developed a protocol for this, the institutional focused TRP can be seen as partly backed by the InterVASP working group which released the IVMS-101 standard – as a way where VASPs can agree on the format of the message payloads that their solutions will transfer.

According to rumors, a source close to ING Bank said that the bank started looking at solutions like these for digital assets (based on the FATF recommendation) early last year.

“The plan was to get an understanding of where the industry is going and see what the opportunities would be for banks when they can play in that space. […] “To be clear, ING is not looking at doing anything with crypto assets and payment tokens like bitcoin. The focus, for now, is more on security tokens and things like that.”

While none of this is confirmed yet, we can see that this might change a lot of things in the banking industry and blockchain space.