Ant International unveils new AI strategy with GenAI platform for fintechs

Ant International, a fintech company, has announced the launch of a new AI platform targeted at super apps and financial services providers.

Leveraging generative AI capabilities trained on Ant International’s key business units – including merchant payment service Antom and cross-border business account service WorldFirst – Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit allows users to build AI-agentic and AI-native financial services with enhanced efficiency, security and flexibility.

The new platform underpins Ant International’s AI strategy, which focuses on AI security, vertical fintech expertise, and full-stack AI platform support.

“The future of finance will be shaped by agentic AI that not only carries out tasks autonomously in real automated workflows, and in a sophisticated financial business and compliance context with reliability, but also interacts, evolves and learns rapidly in orchestration with ever-growing precision,” said Jiangming Yang, chief innovation officer of Ant International.

Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit has been honed on Ant International’s four key business units: the wallet gateway service (Alipay+), the merchant payment service (Antom), the cross-border business account service (WorldFirst), and the embedded finance service (global treasury management, digital lending and credit tech solutions).

Ant International expects to see clients in Southeast Asia and South Asia begin officially deploying the Cockpit solution in June 2025.

A three-pronged AI strategy: Security, vertical fintech expertise, and platform-level support for agentic FinAI

Combining a fintech-specific toolbox and dynamic industry knowledge base, alongside business-ready AI innovations, the Cockpit embodies three key directions of Ant International’s AI strategy.

A security shield for trusted AI

AI scamming threats using deepfake and other technologies have been growing more than 10 fold by the year, with grave implications, especially in the financial sector. Statistics show 22% of businesses have encountered AI-generated payment fraud.

Ant International invests heavily in AI security solutions to combat external AI scamming attacks and to eliminate internal model security risks such as model hallucination or bias.

Its AI SHIELD framework manages risks across system architecture designing, data processing, model training, and inferencing. It offers real-time dynamic risk assessment, including detecting adversarial prompts and sensitive data leakage through over 100 recognition models and 600,000 risk lexicons. Today, the fraud loss rate in Ant International’s merchant payment service is 5% of the industry average.

Deep vertical financial expertise

Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit leverages over 20 leading LLMs, including Ant International’s own Falcon Time-Series Transformer FX Model. However, it has focused on integrating fintech knowledge bases such as bank transfer rules and dispute resolution policies to help businesses build specialised fintech agents.

The Cockpit toolbox supports retrieval-augmented generation, post-training, evaluation, and benchmarking, taking the combination of general-purpose datasets with industry-specific benchmarks developed from Ant International’s financial expertise to help improve model precision.

Built on the Cockpit, the Antom Copilot is the world’s first AI agent designed to help merchants boost conversion by streamlining the process of payment method integration, recommending optimal payment channels, and resolving common tasks such as code correction and the auto-completion of merchant onboarding documents. It also allows merchants to configure risk management strategies with natural language.

Full-stack FinAI platform support

The Cockpit offers a wide selection of pre-built agents covering regular tasks, including customer service, content curation for targeted marketing, and AI-assisted coding. One level up, a business can easily customise agents for more specialised scenarios such as travel advisory, tax refunds, cross-border remittance, and loyalty rewards, accelerating time-to-value across business functions.

Furthermore, the Cockpit’s model context protocol (MCP) marketplace supports major MCP servers developed thus far and allows businesses to create their own MCP servers to enable autonomous task completion. It also supports flexible deployment across public clouds and on-premise environments, drawing on strategic partnerships with Google Cloud and other top-tier infrastructure providers.

“The FinAI sector is at its big-bang moment,” Yang said. “We are eager to work with the industry to evolve and expand the toolbox as well as this ecosystem to help financial businesses scale their growth faster and better.”

This article is sponsored by Ant International.