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University of Twente - ING Collaboration on Artificial Intelligence in Finance

Leon Dusée, COO Risk Department, ING

The collaboration between ING and UT has proven to be highly beneficial for all partners involved, significantly expanding ING's access to a highly educated talent base.

Leon Dusée, COO Risk Department, ING

The Team

Our team consists of 11 full, associate and assistant professors from the University of Twente, under the lead of prof. dr. Jos van Hillegersberg, as well as more than 15 members from ING across eleven different departements, and ten BSc and MSc students, cooperating with ING and that succesfully finished their degree at UT since 2022.

The Start

The University of Twente and the ING Group have put their signatures to a five-year collaboration agreement covering artificial intelligence and data science in the financial world. The partnership was celebrated at FinanceCom 2022, a leading-edge conference hosted by UT. It marks the first time that this international congress in finance and fintech has been held in the Netherlands.

Jos van Hillegersberg, Professor of Business Information Systems at UT, and Academic Director of Jheronimus Academy of Data Science, is looking forward to the collaboration between UT and ING.

Jos van Hillegersberg, Prof. Dr.

We in the Netherlands have been pioneering and innovating applications involving artificial intelligence for quite some time. There are lots of opportunities in the financial sector. But we also ran into a problem: there’s an enormous demand for talent in the business community and academic world. Our partnership will help alleviate this shortage. The fact that ING will be actively investing in UT’s academic knowledge already says a lot.

Jos van Hillegersberg, Prof. Dr.

Personalised Service with AI

For this partnership, final-year undergraduates, researchers and doctoral candidates will be focusing on the application of complex datasets in the financial sector.

Jos van Hillegersberg, Prof. Dr.

That might mean analysis of credit risks, detecting fraud, or advising the bank’s customers about investing, but it might also deal with how to use AI for the bank’s individual customers. Customers have to get back the feeling that they are accessing a personal service. The big banks are closing more and more of their offices and offering their customers services through a standard banking package. It’s not personalised anymore. But with AI we can change that. Some of it is already happening, but the performance of algorithms is still in its infancy. And there are many ethical and law-related issues in the financial world. What are algorithms allowed to do, and what are they not allowed to do? And who is responsible if things go wrong? In short: there’s still a lot to be done.

Jos van Hillegersberg, Prof. Dr.

Prof. Dr. Jos van Hillegersberg

Prof. dr. Jos van Hillegersberg is the scientific director of JADS (Jheronimus Academy of Data Science, 0.8FTE) and full professor of Implementation and Design of Information systems at the University of Twente (0.2FTE). His research is focused on innovative ICT for supply chain systems and for dynamic network organizations. He has more than 30 years of experience in innovative projects, in which he searches for connections between ICT-research and application in industry. He has been the chair of the programme committee of TKI Dinalog Topsector Logistiek for 6 years, during which he was closely involved in the design and execution of logistics research in the Netherlands. Jos is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences and is an author of many international publications in his domain. Jos supervises many MSc- and PhD students, Engineering Doctorates and research faculty. At JADS, he is head of the research departments that consist of the data entrepreneurship, data analytics and data engineering groups. Earlier, he was employed by IBM, Erasmus Universiteit and AEGON. He is a member of several advisory boards and is closely involved in advising start-ups in the domain of IT and business integration.

Joerg Osterrieder, Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Finance

One aspect of the partnership is the appointment of Joerg Osterrieder to a position at UT. Joerg is the Action Chair of the European COST (Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action on Fintech and Artificial Intelligence, with 360 researchers from 51 countries. He is also the coordinator of the MSCA Industrial Doctoral Network on Digital Finance, a European Research and Doctoral Training Programme, with 18 companies and universities from across Europe, including e.g. the European Central Bank and the Bank for International Settlments. Joerg has more than 15 years of experience in the field of digitising the financial sector. Over the past five years he has led more than 30 national and international research projects dedicated to quantitative, data-driven research and financial applications. He was formerly executive director of Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, analyst at AHL and member of the senior management of Credit Suisse Group. The focus of Osterrieder’s activities is the intersection between the business community and the academic world.

Marcos Machado, Assistant Professor 

Marcos Machado is an Assistant Professor in Business and Information Systems at the Industrial Engineering and Business Information Systems (IEBIS) department section of the University of Twente. His current research interests are focused on the applications of machine learning algorithms, data science, and analytics to solve business problems. He received his Ph.D. in Modelling and Computational Science from the Ontario Tech University (Canada), and he holds a MSc in Production Engineering from the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) and a BSc in Mathematics from the Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology of Ceara (Brazil). He also has over seven years of experience working in the Brazilian and Canadian banking industries.

ING: Stay in the Lead

Anand Autar, Global Head Analytics Business Development at ING Group, and Kerem Tomak, Global Chief Analytics Officer, both underscore the importance of the agreement with UT on behalf of ING. They see many advantages in such a public-private partnership as this one: 

Anand Autar, (Former) Global Head Analytics Business Development ING

ING Group has always been in the lead when it comes to financial and technological developments, and we want it to stay that way. That’s the reason we think it’s essential to create a thriving AI ecosystem in the Netherlands that will be meaningful to our final consumers.

Anand Autar, (Former) Global Head Analytics Business Development ING

Kickstart AI

The partnership falls under KickStart AI, an initiative backed by five leading Dutch companies for promoting the development of AI in the Netherlands. Ahold Delhaize, ING, KLM, NS and Philips are working together on initiatives geared towards AI education, talent and innovation. With KickStart AI they have committed to investing in public-private partnerships by jointly sponsoring academic positions, such as the one filled by Joerg Osterrieder at UT.

The site means showcases the partnership between ING and UT within the fields of research and education. The structure of the site content is laid out:

Research Projects

The University of Twente - ING Team

Our team consists of 11 full, associate and assistant professors from the University of Twente as well as more than 15 members from ING across eleven different departements, as well as ten BSc and MSc students, cooperating with ING and that succesfully finished their degree at UT since 2022.

From ING, the following persons are involved:

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