Ant International unveils Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit for fintech AI

Ant International has introduced the Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit, an AI-as-a-Service platform aimed at supporting fintech firms and super apps in developing AI-native financial services.

The Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit platform is designed to integrate automated workflows and orchestrate key fintech operations, including payment processing, customer onboarding, compliance checks, fraud detection, dispute management, and performance evaluation. The initial phase of client integrations will begin in Southeast Asia and South Asia this month.

Jiangming Yang, Chief Innovation Officer of Ant International, commented on the future of financial technology and AI, stating: "The future of finance will be shaped by agentic AI that not only carry out tasks autonomously in real automated workflows and sophisticated financial business and compliance context with reliability, but also interact, evolve and learn rapidly in orchestration with ever-growing precision."

The platform has undergone extensive development within Ant International's four major business areas. These include wallet gateway services (Alipay+), merchant payment solutions (Antom), cross-border business accounts (WorldFirst), and embedded finance services, covering areas such as global treasury management, digital lending, and credit technology. According to Ant International, these internal trials have led to the preparation of the system for external client deployment.

Ant International's AI strategy is built on three pillars: security, vertical fintech expertise, and full-stack AI platform support. Each element has been developed to address specific challenges and requirements within the financial sector.

Security remains a significant concern in the implementation of AI within finance. The company highlights that AI-driven scams, including those using deepfake technology, have increased more than tenfold annually, with 22% of businesses reportedly encountering AI-generated payment fraud. Ant International has invested in an AI SHIELD framework, which is designed to manage risks throughout the system architecture, data handling, model training, and real-time inference stages.

The AI SHIELD framework provides dynamic risk assessment, including the detection of adversarial prompts and data leakages. It utilises more than 100 recognition models and 600,000 risk lexicons. Ant International reports that fraud loss rates in its merchant payment service are now at 5% of the industry average.

The Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit also incorporates deep vertical expertise in finance. Ant International notes the platform leverages more than 20 large language models, including its proprietary Falcon Time-Series-Transformer FX Model. The platform integrates key fintech knowledge bases, such as bank transfer requirements and dispute handling protocols, allowing for the creation of specialised fintech agents for clients.

Within the Cockpit toolbox, features such as retrieval-augmented generation, customised post-training, evaluation, and benchmarking are offered. These combine general-purpose data with industry-specific standards derived from Ant International's sector experience in order to enhance model accuracy and relevancy.

Built using the Cockpit, Antom Copilot is described as the world's first AI agent developed to assist merchants by automating payment method integration, recommending suitable payment channels, and addressing frequent tasks like code rectification and automating merchant onboarding documentation. Merchants are also able to set risk management strategies through natural language interfaces.

On the technical side, the Cockpit platform offers a range of pre-constructed agents for routine operations, such as customer support, curated marketing content, and AI-guided coding. Businesses have the capacity to customise these agents for more tailored purposes, including travel advice, tax refund processing, cross-border remittance, and loyalty rewards, enabling a more rapid implementation of diverse business functions.

The Cockpit's model context protocol (MCP) marketplace enables integration with major MCP servers and allows businesses to build their own, facilitating the completion of autonomous tasks. Flexible deployment options are available, supporting both public clouds and on-premise installations, in collaboration with infrastructure providers including Google Cloud and others.

Discussing the significance of current developments in financial AI, Yang added: "The FinAI sector is at its big-bang moment. We are eager to work with the industry to evolve and expand the toolbox as well as this ecosystem to help financial businesses scale their growth faster and better."

The rollout of Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit to external clients will initially target companies in Southeast Asia and South Asia beginning in June 2025, following successful internal trials by Ant International across its own business units.