Ant Group Chairman Eric Jing used the Singapore FinTech Festival to set out the firm’s roadmap for embedding artificial intelligence and tokenised settlement into the everyday operations of small and medium-sized enterprises, positioning SMEs as central to the next global productivity surge.
He emphasised that AI-enabled financial and operational tools will increasingly define the competitiveness of smaller businesses worldwide.
During the event, Jing outlined Ant Group’s ambition to place AI-driven payment, advisory and workflow tools directly in the hands of SMEs, enabling them to participate more fully in what he characterised as an upcoming productivity revolution. He underscored the company’s commitment to using advanced technology to broaden financial inclusion for smaller firms.
Singapore as a Strategic Hub
Jing also highlighted the strategic role of Singapore, where Ant International – operationally independent since 2024 – is now headquartered. The business works with more than one thousand four hundred institutional partners globally, and its digitisation and payments network serves one hundred and fifty million merchants. Its interoperability with mobile wallets and QR schemes extends to more than one point eight billion consumer accounts worldwide.
Rising Demand for Agentic Finance
Jing pointed to growing demand for personalised AI financial advisors and predicted a rapid acceleration toward agentic commerce, where autonomous systems manage entire payment and operational processes for businesses. He noted that many SMEs struggle with the digital and administrative complexity of global trade, and that AI agents are increasingly capable of supporting them in managing these challenges.
New Tools Designed to Reduce SME Friction
Ant International’s merchant services division, Antom, has already integrated AI into tools such as Antom Copilot, which supports payment integration, merchant onboarding, risk configuration and chargeback handling. The firm reports that Copilot can reduce integration timelines by more than ninety percent, increase chargeback success rates by three percentage points and cut resolution times by almost half.
At the festival, Antom also introduced EPOS360, a consolidated platform that brings together point of sale services, payments, banking, lending and business support to help micro, small and medium-sized enterprises scale more efficiently. Jing likened these emerging AI tools to virtual senior executives that can plan and execute core financial and operational tasks on behalf of smaller firms.
Multi-Agent Systems Already Taking Shape
Jing stressed that autonomous multi-agent systems, capable of coordinating across multiple complex functions, are already moving from concept to deployment. He argued that these systems will form the foundation of the next evolution of global digital commerce, particularly for SMEs trading across borders.
He identified the tokenisation of money as a key requirement for genuine real-time settlement in global trade environments and noted the importance of regulatory leadership, especially from authorities such as the Monetary Authority of Singapore, in providing the clarity needed for industry-wide adoption.
Ant International’s ongoing collaboration with MAS includes participation in initiatives such as Project Guardian and PathFin.ai, which Jing described as strong examples of effective public-private partnership. He highlighted that Singapore’s regulatory sandbox environment provides the necessary structure for implementing emerging technologies while ensuring responsible risk management.
Real-World Progress on Tokenised Money
As part of Project Guardian, Ant International has joined pilot programmes focused on tokenised money and cross-border settlements, showing how blockchain-based solutions can bring real-time visibility and trust to SME transactions.
Within MAS’ PathFin.ai programme, the company has also contributed expertise in AI deployment. Jing drew attention to Ant’s Falcon Time-Series Transformer, an eight point five billion parameter model used for foreign exchange and liquidity forecasting, which has improved the accuracy of cash-flow projections and helped businesses manage hedging costs more effectively.
