India’s fourth-largest private bank Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd (KMBL) and Dutch lender ING Bank have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) where both institutions will cooperate and explore opportunities from cross-border business, investment and trade flows across Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg), Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.
This follows an acquisition of ING Bank's Indian arm ING Vysya by KMBL recently which has made ING Bank a minority stakeholder in the Indian private lender.
The MoU covers an array of co-operation areas such as trade finance, remittances and services related to NRIs, Nostro and Vostro accounts, funding to counterparties’ corporate relationships, fee-based products (including but not limited to foreign exchange, letters of credit and guarantees), direct banking and digital strategy, and cross-border debt capital markets and M&A.
“The merger of ING Vysya Bank with Kotak Mahindra Bank was driven by the growth potential emerging from our complementarities. This MoU is one such opportunity,” Uday Kotak, executive vice chairman and managing director at Kotak Mahindra Bank, said in a press statement.
“We welcome the cooperation between Kotak Mahindra Bank and ING Bank, as it will give clients from The Netherlands and the other 39 countries where we are active in commercial banking access to Kotak’s services in the vast Indian market while at the same time it will offer our combined clients in India the opportunities of ING’s international network,” says Ralph Hamers, CEO of ING.
ING Bank N.V is a subsidiary of ING Group Holdings N.V.
