ING Built a Trading System in Hours With AI. Wall Street's Watching

Mark Nichols

Tue, May 26, 2026 astatine 10:30 AM CDT 4 min read

THE GIST

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ING is utilizing AI to physique physics trading systems successful hours alternatively than weeks. That sounds similar a productivity story. It’s besides a hazard story, a competitory story, and a glimpse astatine wherever the full banking manufacture is heading whether it is acceptable oregon not.

WHAT HAPPENED

ING's planetary caput of physics trading has confirmed the Dutch slope is utilizing vibe coding, the signifier of describing what you privation to a ample connection exemplary and having it constitute the code, to physique trading infrastructure for its overseas speech and recognition businesses. Recent applications see an full recognition e-trading strategy and real-time analytics dashboards showing pricing, incoming trades, and show metrics. Work that antecedently took a squad of developers weeks is present being completed successful hours.

The bank's preferred outer exemplary is Anthropic's Claude. ING credits an in-house AI currency pricing exemplary with an archetypal 50% summation successful large-ticket trades, a fig that points to meaningful commercialized interaction alternatively than experimental tinkering. The physics trading squad numbers astir 10 people, a fraction of the headcount astatine larger rivals, which is precisely wherefore the slope has leaned into the approach: it can’t vie connected earthy assets deployment, truthful it is competing connected however creatively it deploys what it has.

ING separately announced it volition chopped astir 1,250 operations roles globally successful 2026 arsenic portion of a broader effect to AI and digitalization. The caput of physics trading was candid that AI is reshaping what benignant of radical trading floors privation to hire, with the aboriginal workforce expected to halfway connected fewer, much technically blase employees supervising analyzable systems.

The week besides produced a high-profile infinitesimal of blowback connected the quality outgo of that transition. Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters apologized connected LinkedIn aft describing unit acceptable to suffer jobs to AI arsenic lower-value quality superior during a presumption astir plans to chopped astir 7,800 back-office roles by 2030, oregon astir 15% of the bank's operations workforce. The apology was wide viewed arsenic inadequate, with commenters noting that the clarifications helium offered mostly restated the archetypal sentiment.

WHY IT MATTERS

ING's vibe coding communicative is being told arsenic an ratio win, and it is, but that framing undersells what is really happening. A large slope is present deploying AI-generated codification straight into trading systems that grip tens of billions of dollars of enactment per day. That isn’t a prototype. It’s accumulation infrastructure, built faster and with little quality reappraisal than thing that came earlier it.