President of Ant International: Working With All AI Models to Drive Asia Growth for Global Merchants

Ant International:

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Connecting Global Merchants to Digital Asia

"Asia is the world's fastest growth region and the most mobile in terms of payment and financial services," Feagin commented. "Especially the young population. This is the growing part of Asia and they are increasingly digitally enabled."

Today, Ant International connects 1.7 billion consumer accounts of 36 digital wallets, mainly in Asia, to 90 million merchants online and offline globally. 700 million of these accounts are from the fast-growing, mobile-native Asia region, outside of China.

Starting with connecting these wallets across 66 countries and regions, so businesses can receive cross-border payments online and offline from wallet users, Ant International also offers digital marketing and growth tools to engage consumers for tourism bureaus, global businesses, e-commerce, gaming and entertainment platforms. "We work with Google Play, the major airlines, et cetera, to help the US and global giants to grow their reach in Asia," said Feagin.

Expanding Growth in SME Sector and New Regions

Bridging the digital divide for small businesses is also critical to expanding the horizon of growth for Ant International's customers and the company itself. "SMEs are the backbone of economic development around the world. Today with WorldFirst, our digital account services, a small business may have one integrated account to pay, collect, and manage money across the world."

According to Feagin, Ant International is deepening its services in Asia and expanding fast into the Middle East, Latin America and other markets. "Every market has its own fintech players and regulatory context," he said. When asked about the market entry strategy, he said: "We partner with a lot of financial partners, including digital wallets, banks and digital banks to provide different kinds of services."

Ant International has over 30 offices globally. In February, the company opened its first Middle East office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Investing in AI and Tokenisation

Feagin shared that Ant International has been working with partners around the world including JP Morgan, Standard Chartered, and HSBC on tokenised deposit solutions to move money and increase settlement efficiency. On the AI front, the company "keeps an open approach" as to model choices, and work with multiple foundational models in its merchant payment and financial solutions.

"Our strategy is to work with all of the different GenAI companies, ChatGPT or Gemini or DeepSeek, we are open." Responding to questions on application of AI, Feagin added that: "What we focus on is more to use our expertise to build the AI application layer, so AI is now the engine behind the connection between merchants, customers and the financial institutions. We might be talking about standardised APIs, or other solutions to help products and services find their potential consumers in a much quicker and effective way."

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