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Katana Labs, a bond trading tool spun out of ING, is to shut down.
Katana was developed by ING in 2017 to help its bond traders provide sharper pricing to institutional investors by interrogating external and internal data sources.
Available via the Bloomberg APP portal, Katana’s machine learning model screens over 200 million bond pairs to identify spread difference anomalies.
Katana was one of 25 different innovation initiatives nurtured at ING Labs in Amsterdam, London and Singapore, and was the third graduate to enter the scale-up phase, following other projects such as Yolt and Cobase.
The product was spun out as a standalone entity in late 2019 under the leadership of the bank’s global head of credit trading Santiago Brage.
To help pave the way for an independent future, ING Ventures invested a further £1.5m alongside other investors, as part of a £3 million funding round in the startup.
Announcing the shutdown on LinkedIn, Braje writes: ““I regret to announce that Katana Labs will cease to operate as of January 31, 2022.
“Although this is not the outcome we hoped for, I am proud of the cutting edge technology and the exciting product that we developed, which was successfully adopted by leading bond investors. It has been a challenging but extremely enriching journey.”
Financial Services
