Interviews
Published by Wanda Rich
Posted on July 9, 2025
Global Banking and Finance Review
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Ant International is reimagining how financial services scale by embedding intelligence into the infrastructure that powers cross-border commerce. At the center of this transformation is Jiang-Ming Yang (J.M.), appointed Chief Innovation Officer in early 2025 to unify product and engineering under a single Innovation Organization. His mandate: deliver modular, trusted, and scalable tools that address the complex needs of financial institutions, fintechs, and super apps.
With a platform that connects global consumers to more than 100 million merchants, Ant International has the reach—J.M. is focused on removing the friction. “We want to eliminate the boundaries around money movement, payments, and digitalization,” he said. “If we can productionalize that for our partners, we can make a meaningful impact at a global scale.”
The company’s current strategy is centered on three key priorities: secure and trusted AI capabilities, fintech-specific domain expertise, and a flexible AI-as-a-service platform. “AI shouldn’t just belong to big tech companies,” J.M. added. “We want to make AI solutions and products more accessible to everyone.”
These priorities now shape how Ant International builds, delivers, and governs intelligent systems—supporting everything from onboarding and customer support to fraud mitigation, FX optimization, and compliance at scale.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) remain underserved in the global financial system—not for lack of ambition, but because access to foundational infrastructure remains out of reach. Managing cross-border payments, compliance, customer onboarding, and dispute resolution often requires technical and financial resources that only large institutions can justify. The result is a structural imbalance: scale determines capability.
J.M. illustrated this through a straightforward example. “Imagine a jewelry designer in Singapore who wants to sell her products globally,” he said. “She may be confident in her craft, but she likely doesn’t have the resources to handle payments, deal with disputes, or understand the complexities of international fee structures. Those are things big merchants can manage more easily.”
Some of Ant International’s institutional partners face similar constraints. Supporting SMEs at scale typically requires large operations teams, training investments, and tightly managed risk processes.
To close that gap, Ant International focused not on replicating enterprise services but on redesigning them. “Globally, most payment providers serve large merchants,” J.M. noted. “Few are able to offer that same level of capability to SMEs. We see an opportunity to change that.”
To solve the access and scalability challenges faced by SMEs and their financial partners, Ant International focused not just on building tools—but on transforming how those tools are delivered. The result is a platform strategy that embeds operational expertise into modular systems built for seamless partner integration.
At the core of this approach is the Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit, which J.M. described as “an AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) platform that empowers fintech companies and super apps to build AI-agentic and ultimately AI-native financial services.” The platform is designed to help institutions deploy intelligent capabilities with enhanced efficiency, security, and flexibility—without the heavy infrastructure investment that such services once required.
Rather than developing a fixed product suite, Ant International created a modular system that supports a wide range of use cases. The GenAI Cockpit includes a set of ready-to-use agents that can handle specific operational tasks, including customer support, tax refund processing, and cross-border remittances. These components give partners a fast way to bring automation into their systems without the need for extensive engineering work. For more complex implementations, the platform allows organizations to customize workflows, incorporate fintech knowledge bases, and align with their own procedures and review processes.
With built-in support for training pipelines, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), evaluation tools, and deployment across cloud or on-premise environments, the Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit provides a foundation partners can use to build at scale—whether supporting local merchants or operating across complex global markets.
Antom Copilot is one of the clearest demonstrations of how Ant International’s GenAI Cockpit is translating infrastructure into action. Built as a virtual assistant to automate customer support and operational workflows, Antom Copilot turns AI capabilities into measurable efficiency gains for SMEs and institutional partners alike.
Originally developed to support merchants within Ant’s ecosystem, Antom Copilot has since evolved into a flexible tool that external partners can adopt and configure. By integrating knowledge bases, standard operating procedures, and internal approval processes, institutions can deploy the Copilot to streamline the process of payment method integration, increase conversion rates, and even handle fraud-related workflows—with minimal engineering lift.
According to J.M., Satisfaction rates for Antom Copilot have reached 90 percent, and implementation can be completed with as few as ten lines of code.
“Partners don’t need to build an entire team or infrastructure,” said J.M. “With Antom Copilot, they can simply plug in their rules, policies, and workflows, and the agent can take over from there.”
While Antom Copilot shows how support functions can be scaled through automation, the same GenAI Cockpit infrastructure is now being applied across Ant International’s broader ecosystem—from deepfake-resistant KYC to real-time risk and FX operations.
The rise of deepfake technology has forced financial institutions to rethink how they verify identity and assess risk. For Ant International, it’s become one of the clearest examples of why artificial intelligence is no longer optional—it’s foundational.
In 2024, the company observed a sharp increase in deepfake-based Know Your Customer (KYC) attempts, with fraudulent requests—generated using synthetic video, voice, or facial imagery—comprising nearly 70 percent of activity, hitting its verification systems at peak. Traditional methods, such as liveness checks and human review, could no longer keep pace. Having invested in deepfake detection capabilities early on, the company was able to identify and intercept these attempts effectively.
“The only way to fight deepfake is with AI,” said J.M. “Human reviewers can’t detect it at scale. So we built a parallel model designed to detect and neutralize deepfake attacks in real-time.”
This model now plays a central role in Ant International’s security framework. However, its application extends well beyond identity verification. As the volume and velocity of cross-border transactions grow, the platform also handles anti-money laundering (AML) reviews and fraud detection—identifying patterns, flagging anomalies, and helping partners meet compliance requirements without slowing down the flow of funds. This model is also integrated into GenAI Cockpit. It applies these Trusted AI capabilities to help clients ensure service reliability and information security.
In foreign exchange (FX), Ant International uses predictive modeling to support treasury operations. Its Time-Series Transformer FX Model can forecast the company's cashflow and FX exposure on an hourly, daily and weekly basis with over 90% accuracy, allowing merchants to plan liquidity needs more effectively. The system supports over 100 currencies and handles tens of millions of transactions per day, helping partners reduce cost and risk in high-volume markets.
As threat vectors evolve and transaction speed increases, Ant’s AI infrastructure is not just enabling automation—it’s redefining the baseline for trust and resilience in digital finance.
Building scalable AI solutions in financial services requires more than technical innovation—it demands trust, accountability, and regulatory alignment across markets. For Ant International, embedding compliance into product design has been central to its AI deployment strategy.
“We engage with regulators early,” said J.M., “not just to explain what we’re building, but to understand their expectations and incorporate those requirements into our design process.” This collaborative approach allows the company to stay ahead of evolving compliance standards while supporting its partners in navigating regional regulatory complexities.
The GenAI Cockpit was developed with these needs in mind. Its Trusted-AI architecture includes over 100 recognition models and 600,000 risk lexicons to detect hallucinations, reduce data leakage, and ensure real-time content filtering. Whether deployed on the public cloud or in on-premise environments, the platform is designed to meet institutional-grade governance requirements from the outset.
Partners have the flexibility to shape how the AI agents operate by aligning them with their existing processes—whether that means incorporating internal approval steps, local compliance rules, or specific risk thresholds. In areas like fraud detection, Ant International also collaborates with partners to identify patterns and improve safeguards without compromising data confidentiality.
This focus on visibility and governance isn’t just about risk mitigation—it’s a core part of Ant International’s product strategy. As more institutions seek to adopt AI responsibly, the ability to tailor systems to regulatory needs and deploy them across varied operating environments has become a practical requirement, not a future ambition.
As artificial intelligence becomes more deeply embedded in global financial infrastructure, Ant International is positioning itself not just as a technology provider but as a systems builder—focused on scale, resilience, and access.
That vision is already being realized through Ant’s partnerships with banks, digital wallets, and super apps across markets. The modular nature of the GenAI Cockpit allows partners to integrate AI services on their own terms—adapting tools, embedding workflows, and expanding without needing to build core infrastructure themselves.
Looking ahead, the company is continuing to invest in applied AI research, including autonomous agent development, liquidity modeling, and system-level intelligence. The focus remains not on abstract innovation but on practical transformation—enabling more institutions, merchants, and end-users to participate in a digitally connected financial ecosystem.
For J.M., the challenge is not simply building more innovative tools—it’s removing the barriers that limit who can use them. That principle, more than any single product or model, is what defines Ant International’s approach to AI.