Singapore – Ant International, a Singapore-based payments infrastructure firm, has recently ramped up its efforts in integrating artificial intelligence to streamline and safeguard cross-border transactions among small and medium enterprises.
By harnessing AI, Ant International shared that it can now provide hourly currency exchange rate forecasts, in addition to daily and weekly predictions. It also offers accurate forecasts for both inbound and outbound transactions, assisting merchants in reducing transaction costs and enabling them to allocate more resources toward business growth.
Furthermore, this new AI-powered FX model is able to consolidate hundreds of existing models into a single, more accurate system. However, relying heavily on one model to process millions of daily transactions also introduces risks.
“We have safeguards in place to ensure human intervention if discrepancies arise between the new and old models. We avoid having blind faith in AI, maintaining checks to uphold accuracy,” said Yang Peng, chief executive officer at Ant International.
Building from this perspective, the company further said that advancements in generative AI, particularly deepfake technologies, pose significant security challenges for financial institutions, as these sophisticated forgeries are increasingly difficult for humans to detect. To combat these cyberattacks, the company has also created an anti-deepfake electronic Know Your Customer (e-KYC) tool over two years. According to Yang, said tool has an interception success rate exceeding 99%.
Moreover, the company has recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with OCBC with the goal of achieving 24/7 real-time transactions between Singapore and Malaysia through Ant International’s Whale platform using AI and innovations to improve efficiency and transparency.
It has also launched an expanded partnership with QR payment operator PayPay through Alipay+ to expand its merchant coverage network across Japan, offering foreign tourists their preferred payment services via domestic e-wallets.
Commenting about the initiative, Yang Peng, chief executive officer at Ant International, said, “Integration of AI into the processing of cross-border transactions is of critical importance to further strengthening global trade and commerce, especially for SMEs who up to now can’t afford real-time global settlement services.”
“In deploying AI in merchant services, enhanced fraud detection and prevention against new scamming schemes like deepfaking is as important, if not more important, as increasing operational efficiency,” explained Peng.
