Ant International Powered Over 2 Billion Transactions in its Core Emerging Markets in 2025, Expanding AI Payments and Digital Commerce Tools for Inclusive Growth

Business Wire India

• 150 million merchants across the world from Kuala Lumpur to London leverage Ant International’s solutions to reach local and global customers.
• In its main emerging markets, clients in Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, including the SME sectors, recorded strong uplift through digital payments, cross-border commerce and banking solutions in 2025.

Ant International supported over 2 billion digital cross-border transactions in 2025 for merchants in its core emerging markets including Southeast Asia (SEA), South Asia, the Middle East and Latin America (LATAM), as the company builds out a broader range of AI-powered digital financial and commerce solutions tailored to these regions’ diverse needs.

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Ant International is focused on improving access to payments, credit, digital banking and cross-border connectivity in fast-growing but fragmented digital economies. The company currently serves more than 150 million merchants globally, 90% of which are SMEs.

“In the world’s fastest growing emerging markets, real-world, trusted and scalable adoption of AI and other new technologies can unlock entirely new growth opportunities for businesses big and small,” said Douglas Feagin, President of Ant International. “It is time for fintech innovators to convert access into real growth momentum. We will work even harder to put AI-powered digital payments, financing, commerce and cross-border solutions on the ground for entrepreneurs and communities with ever lower cost and ever stronger safety and security guardrails.”

Digital Inclusion multiplies growth

Payment digitalisation and integration is crucial for business success in emerging markets:

• Through Alipay+ and Antom, online and offline merchants accept a variety of QR, mobile and card payments
• With strong leadership across Asia, Ant International will expand this connectivity to the Middle East and LATAM
• Alipay+ will also empower e-wallet and super-app development in more markets to support the growth of local payments and fintech ecosystems.

Access to banking and financing remains a key challenge for SMEs:

• Bettr expanded credit services for over 30 million SMEs and individuals, and expanding across LATAM following a strategic investment in R2, the leading embedded lending infrastructure company in LATAM.

Putting on the Ground Effective and Trusted Innovation

Ant International is laser-focused on building trusted FinAI technologies. In 2025, Ant international open-sourced its proprietary Falcon Time-Series Transformer (TST) AI model, which enhanced AirAsia’s FX risk management and reduced its hedging costs by up to 40%.

While investing in cutting-edge fintech innovations, Ant International is also focused on supporting effective, safe, and controlled adoption of AI in commerce to help merchants achieve measurable and scalable results.

• Antom, our flagship merchant payment services, now help clients to cut payment integration time by as much as 95% with Antom Copilot, its pioneering payment agent. Antom Payment Orchestration (APO) service builds one-integration, all-around payment access for merchants with smart routing to improve payment success rates. Overall, Antom clients recorded a 75% growth outside China.
• Combining localised expertise with adaptive AI tools, our full-suite payments platforms 2C2P in SEA and MultiSafePay in Europe now support a broad range of businesses from regional airline, O2O, e-commerce leaders to local SMEs.
• EPOS360, a pioneering AI-powered SME app, integrates practical AI tools with POS system, payments, banking, financing, and growth operations for small businesses.
• WorldFirst, extending proven AI capabilities in FX management, risk control and customer service, has evolved into a 360-degree global digital account service to offer payment and financial management tools across 200+ markets and 130+ e-marketplaces.

Adoption of AI has to be premised on a strong security foundation. Ant International's SHIELD 3-in-1 risk management transformer model integrates graph, sequence and tabular modalities in protecting our clients and our businesses. It has achieved 95% precision in identifying high-risk transactions, and boosted payment success rates by as much as 13.5%.

Interoperability and Real-Time Payment (RTP) Efficiency unlocks Future of Commerce

Cross-border interoperability across diverse modes of payments, remains a key driver of trade, tourism and economic growth. Alipay+ currently connects more than 1.8 billion user accounts across 40 international payment partners to merchants across more than 100 markets. It is the world’s largest cross-border mobile payment public-private partnership, collaborating with 11 national QR networks globally. Through a partnership with Mastercard, Alipay+ partners – AlipayHK, GCash and Kakao Pay – can tap-to-pay via NFC across Mastercard-enabled merchants.

Ant International’s Platform Tech enables highly efficient cross-border fund transfers by processing over US$600 billion via blockchain, operating 24/7 with more than 95 percent completed on the same day. In addition, Ant International and SWIFT recently pioneered the first bank-to-wallet payment, opening the opportunity for global bank customers to send funds directly to mobile wallets.

Southeast Asia Champions Inclusive Fintech Success

In SEA, where Ant International has worked with local partners for more than a decade, SMEs have seen measurable impact to their businesses.

Regional FinAI Development:

• Alipay+ continues to support the development of the region’s largest mobile platforms, including DANA (Indonesia), GCash (the Philippines), TrueMoney (Thailand) and TNG Digital (Malaysia), transforming financial transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses.
• In 2025, 3 regional apps began to build own AI-driven super app with the support of Ant International's AI-as-a-Service platform, the GenAI Cockpit.
• Alipay+ Voyager, an AI travel services agent, was launched successfully in 6 apps across Asia.

Interoperability:

• Alipay+ partners with 5 national QR payment networks in ASEAN – in Singapore and Malaysia, travellers spent 2.7 times and 2 times more respectively via SGQR and DuitNow QR, bringing real economic value to SMEs. In Malaysia, travellers have used their home e-wallet or bank app to make payment at more than 360,000 SMEs across the country, enabling them to benefit from tourism growth.
• SEA super apps, like GCash, are the world's first to begin wallet-to-card mobile payment integration with Alipay+'s NFC partnership with Mastercard to combine their merchant QR and POS networks.

Trade and Commerce:

• 2C2P under Antom saw 38% YoY growth in transaction volume for merchants in SEA, driven by growth in the e-commerce, airline, OTA, and retail sectors, and marked by strong momentum in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
• WorldFirst, with new entries into Malaysia and Thailand, saw nearly 40% growth in transaction value in 2025 as more SEA SMEs take on global e-commerce.

Inclusive Finance:

• Bettr provides credit tech solutions to four leading SEA mobile wallets, driving a 184% increase in user base.
• ANEXT Bank in Singapore saw a six-fold increase in cross-border transaction volumes, with 69% of its customers being micro-businesses.

“As digital economies across Southeast Asia and other developing markets continue to scale, Ant International remains focused on enabling access and fostering shared prosperity. We work with partners, governments and businesses to promote growth that is inclusive, sustainable and globally connected,” Feagin said.

Note: All data are year-on-year comparisons for 2025 vs 2024

About Ant International

With headquarters in Singapore and main operations across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, Ant International is a leading global digital payment, digitisation and financial technology provider. Through collaboration across the private and public sectors, our unified techfin platform supports financial institutions and merchants of all sizes to achieve inclusive growth through a comprehensive range of cutting-edge digital payment and financial services solutions. To learn more, please visit https://www.ant-intl.com/

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