Multinational ING Bank is learning lessons from the unregulated and experimental decentralized finance (DeFi) space.

This includes looking into new asset classes and potentially adopting elements of DeFi’s "Lego" brick-style of building products, known in the Ethereum ecosystem as “composability.”

Speaking at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2021, ING blockchain lead Mariana Gomez de la Villa said the way the DeFi space has been able to innovate, albeit without regulation, is something the bank has been watching closely.

“What attracts us is the opportunities to attract innovation in order to create new asset classes,” said Gomez de la Villa, adding:

Earlier this month, ING acknowledged DeFi was probably going to be more disruptive to the banking system than bitcoin, issuing a paper on the subject that included a case study on DeFi platform Aave.

Asked whether banks are likely to apply DeFi’s innovations to the collateralized loan market or non-collateralized loans, or even including traditional collateral such as real estate, Gomez de la Villa said it was still quite early to comment specifically.

“We will see a lot of innovation on asset classes where institutions like ours could play a huge role,” Gomez de la Villa said. “For example, the way that some of these transactions are accessible to a lot of different people that currently are not having access to those types of investments.”