A major European bank is now writing trading software the way most people write emails: by describing what they want in plain English and letting AI do the heavy lifting.
ING Groep, one of the largest financial institutions in the Netherlands, has integrated so-called “vibe coding” into its electronic trading operations for currencies and credit products. The bank’s quant desk started experimenting with the approach in February 2026 and, by mid-May, was using it daily to generate trading-side code and visualizations.
What vibe coding actually means
The term “vibe coding” was coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in 2025. In English: instead of writing code line by line, developers describe what they want a program to do using natural language prompts, and a large language model generates the code for them.
At ING, the process runs under senior supervision. Experienced developers review and validate the output, which means the technology functions more like a force multiplier than a replacement.
