The number of merchants using artificial intelligence to integrate payment services with Ant International has quadrupled over the past year, as the fintech company expands AI into payments, foreign exchange, treasury, and credit operations.
Ant International said it expects 95% of merchants to be able to onboard new payment methods within one hour by the end of 2026, highlighting a push to use AI to automate more of the financial workflows involved in running cross-border businesses.
The figures are company-reported.
The Ant Group unit said it is rolling out an AI-native product stack of nearly 100 products across its Alipay+, Antom, WorldFirst, and Bettr businesses, with products scheduled to reach global markets through the second half of 2026.
The expansion moves Ant International’s use of AI beyond individual payment functions toward broader financial operations, including merchant onboarding, payment orchestration, fraud prevention, reconciliation, foreign-exchange management, liquidity forecasting, and credit decisions.
Ant International said its Antom Autopilot provides a conversational interface across the merchant payment lifecycle, covering onboarding, integration, payment routing, fraud protection, revenue recovery, troubleshooting, reconciliation, and market expansion.
The company said 89.5% of merchants using its Antom service have deployed AI agents and that AI assists with 81.4% of payment tasks. Those figures are also based on Ant International’s own reporting.
The company’s underlying Antom 3-in-1 Transformer has more than 10 billion parameters and is designed to process sequential, tabular and graph data within a single architecture.
Ant International said the model processes about 90 trillion data points annually and is used for fraud, scam and abuse prevention as well as payment optimization.
The company is also extending AI into business accounts and treasury through WorldFirst, targeting small and medium-sized enterprises as well as larger corporate customers.
WorldFirst is adding natural-language and agent-based workflows for account onboarding, payments, and treasury management.
Its Wyn assistant is aimed at SMEs, while WorldFirst for Enterprise is adding supervised AI workflows for compliance, electronic know-your-customer and know-your-business processes, payments, and treasury.
The company’s treasury products include tools for cash visibility, foreign-exchange and cash-flow forecasting, dynamic pricing, hedging recommendations, liquidity management, and payout-route selection.
Ant International said its FalconTST model, which has more than 8.5 billion parameters, achieved more than 93% accuracy in foreign-exchange and cash-flow forecasting in its own real-world cases.
It also said the system reduced corporate foreign-exchange hedging and allocation costs by 30% to 60% in those cases.
AI is being extended into lending through Bettr’s AI Credit Engine, which Ant International said is being used by 49 institutions across 28 markets with access to more than 100 million users.
Bettr Global Credit can return credit decisions in as little as one minute, according to the company.
The expansion comes as financial technology companies increasingly explore agentic AI, in which software agents can perform tasks and transactions rather than simply provide recommendations.
Ant International has also been working with Mastercard and Visa on standards for identifying and governing AI agents in payment environments, building on its earlier work on the Alipay+ Agentic Mobile Protocol and know-your-agent controls.
