Ant International Deepens Payment and Digitalisation Ecosystem with AI-Driven Embedded Finance Solutions in Year of Transformation
Numbers show Alipay+ expands a vibrant wallet-based payment and digitalisation space that further strengthens WorldFirst and Antom, the two business fintech services.Starting with over 11 million underserved SMEs and individuals in Southeast Asia and South Asia, the new Embedded Finance segment deepens Ant International’s ecosystem by offering a rich array of FX, treasury management, inclusive lending and other AI-powered fintech solutions to clients and partners across the other three main businesses.
With a series of organisational and strategic upgrades in 2024, Ant International, a leading global digital payment and financial technology provider, reported robust growth over the past year among all its four pillar businesses, Alipay+, Antom, WorldFirst and Embedded Finance.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241205425502/en/
(Graphic: Business Wire)
Alipay+ expanded its vibrant wallet-based payment and digitalisation space that further strengthens WorldFirst and Antom, the two business fintech services. The new Embedded Finance segment deepens Ant International's ecosystem by offering a rich array of FX, treasury management, inclusive lending and other AI-powered fintech solutions to clients and partners across the other three main businesses.
“2024 has been a transformative year for Ant International,” said Peng Yang, Chief Executive Officer of Ant International. “We are committed to advance inclusive growth through AI-powered innovation and collaboration on cross-border travel, trade, commerce and inclusive finance.”
Based in Singapore, Ant International provides partners across industries and markets a comprehensive range of digital payment and financial technology solutions. It is committed to driving inclusive growth through open collaboration and continuous innovation.
Among Ant International's notable progresses in 2024 so far:
Alipay+: Ant International’s cross-border mobile payment and digitalisation technology solutions.
- Alipay+ leads the industry in collaboration with 35 leading mobile payment partners, including e-wallets, banking apps and BNPL apps, etc., connecting over 90 million merchants in 66 markets to 1.6 billion user accounts. It has also formed strategic partnerships with national standardised QR schemes, such as Singapore’s SGQR, Malaysia’s PayNet, South Korea’s ZeroPay, Cambodia's KHQR, Nepal’s NepalPay QR and Sri Lanka's LankaPay.
- Among the global merchants accepting QR code payments via Alipay+, over 90% are SMEs, reflecting Ant International’s focus on inclusive digital transformation.
- Cross-border transactions of global payment partners together (excluding Alipay) via Alipay+ registered three times year-on-year increase in 2024, where Alipay maintains the leadership.
Alipay+ builds a broader digital payment and digitalisation ecosystem for other pillar businesses of Ant International.
Antom: a leading merchant payment and digitisation services provider, offering one-stop, vertical-specific digital payment solutions to merchants of all sizes.
- Total payment volume (TPV) of Antom’s direct acquiring services nearly doubled between January and November 2024 over same period of 2023.
- Antom continues to strengthen its payment processing capabilities across all payment channels. Antom’s card processing volume grew over 10 times from that of previous year, while delivering top notch authorization rates to its global enterprise merchants.
- Antom continues to launch tech-driven innovative solutions to provide more secure and efficient services at lower cost to its customers. Antom Copilot helped enhance operational efficiency for merchants by reducing the payment channel integration time from 5 to 10 days to only a few minutes. Antom EasySafePay streamlined digital wallet payments procedures, eliminating the need to redirect from merchant checkout page to the user’s wallet app, and offers full account takeover protection to wallet users, and lead to significant payment success rate increase.
WorldFirst: a one-stop digital payment and financial services platform for global businesses.
- In 2024, five years after its acquisition, WorldFirst achieved an annual TPV of US$100 billion, four times that of 2020. This marks its transformation into the world's leading one-stop digital payment and financial services platform for cross-border businesses.
- Accumulatively, WorldFirst has served more than 1 million SMEs globally, with a total TPV surpassing US$300 billion and an ever-strengthening growth momentum as it expands footprints from Asia and Europe to the rest of the world.
Under Embedded Finance, our Credit Tech and Platform Tech teams leverage cutting-edge AI and blockchain technologies to innovate secure, end-to-end embedded finance solutions to clients and partners across Alipay+, Antom and WorldFirst businesses, ranging from risk-modelling, cross-border settlement, FX and liquidity management, to credit and lending services for underserved SMEs and individuals.
- In line with G20's commitment to lower cross-border payment costs via technology innovation, Platform Tech developed a world-leading Time-Series Transformer AI FX Model to help multi-national merchants in airline, e-commerce and other sectors to improve treasury management efficiency and reduce cost. Our FX solutions predict real-time local currency needs by the hour, with an accuracy of over 90%, significantly lowering cost and uncertainty for not only our own operations but millions of merchants, including SMEs.
Through collaborative innovation with global financial institutions, we leverage blockchain technology to provide 24/7 real-time cross-border settlement serviceability to our global business and clients. In 2024, the blockchain solution supported over one third of Ant International's total processing volume.
- In 2024, leveraging AI-powered Credit Tech and Risk Tech capabilities, Ant International added to ANEXT Bank, its Singapore-based MSME-focused digital bank, a new inclusive credit service under the brand bettr. Today in emerging markets including Bangladesh and Indonesia, bettr collaborates with local fintech partners to enable over 11 million unserved micro businesses and individuals, most first-time borrowers, to acquire uncollateralized loan services based on more accurate and fairer credit ratings.
- In 2024, loans under management across Ant International's SME financing services more than doubled compared to 2023.
“In 2025, we will continue to be laser-focused on supporting SMEs across borders with AI-powered innovative and trusted payment, digitalisation, and inclusive financing solutions through expanded public- and private-sector collaboration,” said Yang.
About Ant International
Headquartered in Singapore, Ant International powers the future of global commerce with digital innovation for everyone and every business to thrive. In close collaboration with partners, we support merchants of all sizes worldwide to realize their growth aspirations through a comprehensive range of tech-driven digital payment and financial services solutions.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241205425502/en/
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
Binarly to Unveil “Broken Trust” Research: Firmware Bypass Chains, BMC Persistence, and EDR Evasion15.1.2026 23:04:00 CET | Press release
Binarly, the industry leader in software and firmware supply-chain security, today announced an upcoming DistrictCon presentation “Broken Trust: Firmware Bypass Chains, BMC Persistence, and EDR Evasion.” The session will detail how firmware-level attack chains observed in shipped enterprise devices can effectively undermine modern endpoint defenses, enabling stealthy compromise and long-lived persistence. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260115834965/en/ Binarly Unveils Broken Trust Research: Firmware Bypass, BMC Persistence In this presentation, the Binarly REsearch team will dismantle the assumption of hardware trust by presenting multiple real-world firmware bypass chains. Alex Matrosov and Fabio Pagani will provide a deep dive into the specific vulnerability classes and exploitation primitives that make these attacks reliable in practice. The team will also deliver a live demonstration compromising a fully
Coolbrook Named on the 2026 Global Cleantech 10015.1.2026 18:14:00 CET | Press release
Coolbrook, a transformational technology and engineering company on a mission to decarbonise major industrial sectors like petrochemicals and chemicals, iron and steel, aluminium, and cement, has been named on Cleantech Group’s 2026 Global Cleantech 100. This annual list recognizes companies poised to deliver market-ready solutions that advance a cleaner, more resilient global future. The report highlights innovators addressing some of the world’s most urgent environmental and infrastructure challenges. The complimentary report introduces you to innovators advancing groundbreaking technologies and business models to enable us to act on the ever-increasing climate and environmental crisis. Following a 2025 marked by geopolitical volatility and shifting economic signals, the global cleantech ecosystem enters 2026 with slightly greater certainty - yet heightened competitive pressure. Growth is concentrating around two dominant themes: AI infrastructure and critical minerals. “The 2026 Glo
World Economic Forum and Salesforce Empower Global Leaders With First-of-its-Kind Agentic Assistant for the 2026 Annual Meeting in Davos15.1.2026 18:01:00 CET | Press release
The Forum activates its vast data stores through Agentforce 360, enabling a level of preparation and decision-making for its over 3,000 attendees previously unachievable by human processing alone Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the world’s #1 CRM, today announced the activation of the World Economic Forum’s institutional knowledge powered by Agentforce 360 to support over 3,000 of the world’s most influential leaders at the 2026 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. The Forum has launched a new proactive, high-precision concierge app, “EVA,” built on the Agentforce 360 Platform, Salesforce’s agentic platform. EVA will empower attendees to move beyond traditional information access, with an AI agent that doesn’t just answer questions, but can reason, prioritize, and act on a leader’s behalf for the 2026 Annual Meeting. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260115571119/en/ Scheduled for January 19–23 in Davos, Switzerland, th
Frasca to Supply Four New Flight Training Devices to Global Medical Response15.1.2026 16:05:00 CET | Press release
New Level 7 FTDs will support pilot training for emergency medical operations Frasca International, Inc., a FlightSafety International company, today announced it has signed a contract with Global Medical Response (GMR) to supply four new Level 7 Flight Training Devices (FTDs). The new devices include an Airbus EC135, a Pilatus PC-12, a Beechcraft C90, and a Beechcraft B200. Each FTD will feature Frasca's unique motion system to provide enhanced realism in training. The devices will be installed at GMR’s new training facility currently under construction in Denton, Texas. Frasca has supported GMR’s pilot training efforts for nearly two decades, beginning with the delivery of their first device in 2005 for Air Evac Lifeteam, a GMR company. Since then, Frasca simulators have played a central role in preparing GMR’s flight crews for the complex and high-stakes environments they encounter in emergency medical operations. With the delivery of these new devices, GMR will operate a total of 1
illumynt Reports 60% Revenue Growth and Launches Global Innovation Center to Meet Rising Enterprise Security and Sustainability Demands15.1.2026 15:11:00 CET | Press release
illumynt an intelligent, security-first technology lifecycle partner, today announced significant growth and innovation milestones that position the company as a leader in the next evolution of the IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) industry—an industry increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, accelerated hardware refresh cycles, and heightened regulatory scrutiny. Under the leadership of CEO Joerg Herbarth, illumynt continues to execute its mission to deliver intelligent, technology-driven lifecycle solutions that maximize sustainability, security, and recovery value for the world’s most compute-intensive organizations. In 2025, ITAD became a strategic imperative. AI-driven workloads have dramatically compressed infrastructure lifecycles, while updates to NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 2, adoption of R2v3, and the expansion of global privacy frameworks have raised expectations for auditability, transparency, and verified data security. As a result, ITAD has evolved from a back-end operational fu
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom