Ant Financial CEO Presents Company’s New Development Strategy

On Sept. 17, Ant Financial announced the company’s technological capabilities, growth strategy, and planned partnerships with financial institutions in hopes of creating long-lasting customer values, enhancing user experience, and establishing a strong growth momentum.

According to Eric Jing, Ant Financial’s Executive Chairman and CEO, Alipay had over 700 million annual active users as of August 2018, an increase of more than 200 million year‐on‐year. Its overseas business also experienced a rapid growth seeing as Alipay’s transaction volume in Korea has grown by eight times this year.

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Jing attributed the growth momentum to its original BASIC technological strategy, which is to build an open ecosystem to help Ant Financial’s partners to better serve their consumers and small businesses by providing a full suite of products, solutions, and technologies.

He also gave a few examples of how Ant Financial can significantly reduce fraud, process credit assessments more efficiently, and speed up money transfers.

By leveraging Ant Financial’s AI‐driven credit assessment technologies, traditional financial institutions can extend lines of credit to approximately 11 million small businesses. Small businesses had previously had great difficulty obtaining sufficient financing from banks due to the lack of cost‐effective credit assessment technology.

With AlphaRisk, Ant Financial’s AI‐powered risk engine, Alipay’s fraud loss rate has been further reduced to lower than 5 in 10 million. This means that for every $10 million worth of payments, fraud induced loss is less than $5, which is significantly lower than the industry average.

With its proprietary blockchain technology, AlipayHK and GCash launched a global cross‐border remittance service in June 2018. This service allows individuals in Hong Kong and the Philippines to transfer money within seconds in a secure, transparent, and cost-efficient way.

In May this year, the Alibaba subsidiary raised a historic $14 billion in its Series C funding round, increasing its value to around $150 billion. The Alipay creator said the company will continue to invest in developing its AI, blockchain, security, IoT, and computing capabilities to upgrade its global technology platform.