ING becomes first major Dutch bank to use AI in nonstandard mortgage applications
ING is deploying artificial intelligence to help assess non-standard mortgage applications, becoming the first major Dutch bank to take this step, according to the Financieele Dagblad (FD). The move is intended to speed up decisions for homebuyers in a tight housing market while strengthening ING’s competitive position.
About 80 percent of mortgage applications ING receives reportedly fall outside standard policy criteria, including cases involving self-employed applicants and borrowers who are within 10 years of retirement age. In these cases, bank staff previously had to manually search through large volumes of documents to extract relevant information, a time-consuming process.
The bank said the AI system will scan documents in these complex cases rather than relying entirely on staff, while emphasizing that final lending decisions will remain with human employees. ING also cited a looming shortage of qualified mortgage assessment staff as a key factor in the rollout.
Mortgage application processing at ING currently takes an average of three days. The bank hopes artificial intelligence will shorten that timeline, though it has not specified by how much. It also said the system aims to ease pressure on employees handling mortgage reviews.
ING also reportedly hopes to expand its share of the mortgage market through the use of AI, a move that observers expect other banks to follow as competition increases.
Other Dutch banks, including ABN Amro, Rabobank, ASN, and Triodos, already use artificial intelligence, though mainly for limited tasks such as generating meeting notes and processing documents rather than evaluating complex applications.
Regulators De Nederlandsche Bank and the Authority for the Financial Markets declined to comment on ING’s specific initiative but have generally warned that AI in lending decisions carries risks, including of potential impact of data errors on consumers. ING said errors in testing have been “sporadic” and that it continues to monitor and resolve issues in the system.
