For the global financial sector, 2025 will be remembered as a year when technological advancements will transform the world of payment, settlement, liquidity and credit. The strategic choices that banks, fintechs and merchants make in adopting and scaling new innovations will likely define their growth horizons for years to come. Ant International, a global leader in payments and digitalization based in Singapore, is pioneering some of the most advanced programs in two critical areas: AI-based agent commerce solutions and tokenization.
Peng Yang, CEO of Ant International, discussed the company’s AI roadmap and priorities at the Singapore FinTech Festival 2025 alongside the region’s top financial industry executives.
International Ant
The power of connectivity in emerging markets
With a focus on payment services for merchants, fintechs and banks, Ant International’s payment technology, wallet technology, risk technology, platform technology and credit technology solutions now span more than 200 markets, connecting 1.8 billion user accounts and 150 million merchants, particularly in emerging Asia Pacific markets.
- Alipay+, its global wallet gateway service, connects 40 mobile payment partners and 11 national QR systems, providing global coverage for merchants as well as payments interoperability between bank accounts, digital wallets, QR and NFC.
- WorldFirst, the company’s global business account service, supports international business growth with cross-border transfers available in more than 100 currencies and partnerships with more than 130 e-commerce marketplaces.
- Antom integrates over 300 payment methods to provide unified payment services to platform companies and merchants, especially those seeking growth in Asia.
- Under Bettr, its lending technology service helps platforms and merchants offer loans to SMEs; and the platform’s technical team supports banks in AI and blockchain-based settlement and liquidity management.
Agent Commerce Solutions
Payment: from agents to protocols
As a transaction closing step, payment remains THE essential link in the future of AI-powered commerce. Antom Copilot, an industry-first AI agent designed for managing payments and merchant operations developed by Ant International, just received major upgrades. Integrated with the Antom Merchant Portal, Antom Copilot now offers enhanced automation and tailored support with features such as agentic support for the entire payments lifecycle, domain-trained intelligence capabilities, and improved resolution performance in real-world, multi-step operational scenarios.
Antom, Ant International’s merchant payments brand, has also introduced an “AI payment companion” to support the agent payment flow. The Antom agent payment solution connects AI agents to various alternative payment methods (APMs), including a wide range of digital wallets and credit cards, to enable a fast and secure payment process. It also includes an AI-enabled payment mandate model and enhanced payment asset management to ensure accurate recognition of user intent while maintaining transaction security and providing increased transparency to users.
According to Jiangming Yang, the company’s chief innovation officer, to ensure secure, interoperable and automated transactions between intelligent agents, Ant International is actively investing in the co-development of new agent protocols with industry partners. Antom is working in collaboration with Google to develop the Agent Payment Protocol (AP2) and is also one of the first partners of Mastercard and Visa to pilot card transaction capabilities for AI agents. Antom aims to help AI agents support various payment methods such as cards, wallets and bank transfers, effectively reaching a wide customer base while reducing integration costs.
AI as a Service for Businesses Large and Small
Beyond payment, Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit is an AI-as-a-Service platform designed to help financial services companies build AI-driven generative agentic applications, ranging from payment orchestration, customer onboarding and compliance checks, to fraud detection and dispute resolution. Malaysian e-wallet operator TNG Digital and Pakistan’s leading digital bank, easypaisa, have adopted the Cockpit platform to improve customer service.
For small businesses that need reliable AI integration into standard store management operations before finding tailored solutions, Antom has launched an SME AI application, EPOS360. It integrates an AI co-pilot to simplify operations, from online store creation to cash flow tracking, transforming business insights into actionable insights.
AI for liquidity management
In the broader settlement area, the company is investing in the combination of global liquidity management and AI forecasting. Since 2024, the Falcon, a time series transformer model developed by Ant International, has been deployed by the company to forecast its own trading volumes and reduce its foreign exchange hedging costs. Upgraded this year with 8.5 billion parameters, the Falcon model is trained on the company’s proprietary pre-training and supervised fine-tuning frameworks.
By 2025, Falcon has already processed $1.5 trillion in transactions for Ant International, delivering over 90% accuracy and reducing foreign exchange costs by 60%. It also helps banks and airlines manage foreign exchange management better. Now open source, the model is poised for adoption in e-commerce, travel and beyond.
Security in the age of AI
“The introduction of AI must be supported by a comprehensive security architecture that not only responds to, but stays ahead of, the dynamic dynamics of risk and compliance,” Peng Yang, CEO of Ant International, said at the Singapore Fintech Festival 2025. The company’s investments range from foundational technology to commercialized operations to strategic partnerships across sectors.
Fundamental Safety Technology
In 2025, Ant International began systematically deploying its 3-in-1 SHIELD Transformer model for risk management, which integrates graphical, sequential and tabular modalities into a single AI foundation tailored for financial risks. The model can achieve 95% accuracy in identifying high-risk transactions and increases payment success rates by 13.5%.
A reliable data protection architecture that meets compliance parameters is a prerequisite for the cross-industry application of AI and other new technologies. With 11 data centers around the world, Ant International invests heavily in advanced privacy computing, enabling partners to keep raw data local while securely sharing business information via encrypted computing.
Application and collaboration on payment security
SHIELD-secured risk management solutions provide full transaction lifecycle protection at Ant International. These solutions protect businesses and users against fraud and scams. For example, Alipay+ account protection solution EasySafePay 360 can reduce the incidence of account takeovers for digital wallet payments by 90%.
Ant International protects transactions against deepfake attacks with a detection rate greater than 99.8%. The company won first place in the NeurIPS competition for fairness in AI face detection, achieving both accuracy and fairness in AI face detection across all demographics.
In September 2025, the company launched the Digital Wallet Guardian partnership with partners in Asia to share these tools to improve system-wide security in the payments industry.
New payment frontiers
“Time and time again, we see that payments innovations deliver benefits that trickle down to merchants, consumers, SMEs and underserved communities,” Peng Yang said at the Singapore Fintech Festival when the company introduced iris authentication in its smart glasses payment solution.
As the financial industry rapidly adopts AI, payment remains the foundation of all fintech and financial services. Ant International strives to push the boundaries of payments from every angle: agent payments, chain payments, hardware-integrated consumer payments services, card + QR interoperability, bank-to-wallet connectivity and much more.
For example, the company has established extensive partnerships with global banks to deploy blockchain-based tokenized deposits, including HSBC, Standard Chartered, Citi and JPMorgan, among others. Ant International is also a leading contributor to key regulatory initiatives in the field, including the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Guardian and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s Project Ensemble.
“We are facing a post-Internet technological revolution that will bring unprecedented opportunities and challenges to emerging markets and small businesses,” Peng Yang said. “Since day one at Ant, our mission has been clear: to democratize technological innovation and make it accessible to everyone.
