Ant International’s next payments bet: AI agents

Ant International started with a simple mission: Take Alipay abroad. A decade later, the company spans payments, merchant acquiring, lending, and cross-border financial services.

Its Alipay+ network now connects more than 50 e-wallets and bank apps and powered over 2 billion cross-border digital transactions in 2025. A US$1.2 billion series A fundraise earlier this year gave the company more firepower to expand globally and into AI-powered commerce.

In 2024, Ant International generated about US$3 billion, and that figure rose roughly 25% last year. Its AI strategy has so far remained focused on commerce and payments even as its parent Ant Group makes bigger bets on frontier models, healthcare, and robotics.

In this conversation with Tech in Asia, Douglas Feagin, president of Ant International, discusses how the company’s sprawling businesses fit together, what Chinese payment innovations could travel overseas, and the challenges of expanding beyond Asia.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In 2016, the international strategy was about taking Alipay abroad. Since then, that has expanded to Alipay+, WorldFirst, Bettr, and Antom. What does Ant International ultimately want to become – a payments network, a fintech infrastructure company, or something else?

It’s really a combination of doing online payment through Antom, our merchant-acquiring business; [facilitating] cross-border payment through Alipay+; and serving small businesses, primarily through both WorldFirst and Bettr.

If you go back to 2016 and look at the roots of the company, they were – as you said – taking Alipay around the world and enabling the Alipay user to transact everywhere. It started with that one wallet, but then we seeded the other 10 wallets we invested in. Now 50 wallets have partnered with Alipay+, and we’re enabling them to go around the world.

We had a core expertise from Alipay. As the payment provider to Alibaba, AliExpress, and Lazada, we have developed a real expertise serving merchants.

How do Ant International’s various business units complement each other?

Antom’s core expertise is selecting payment channels and making sure that we’re finding the right payment channel for that merchant to accept. But then we need to have linkages to the end-wallets and customers, and that relationship is largely supported Alipay+.