Ant Group aligns AI and tokenisation to change cross-border finance

At Hong Kong Fintech Week 2025 last week, Ant Group’s Chairman, Eric Jing, positioned the city as a hub for AI-driven and tokenised financial innovation. His remarks highlight a shift in Asia’s financial sector, where regulated artificial intelligence and blockchain-based tokenisation are changing cross-border payments, trade finances, and liquidity management models.

For business and technology leaders in Asia-Pacific, Hong Kong’s ecosystem offers a preview of what regulated financial AI could look like: integrated systems, transparent tokenised settlement, and governance frameworks in line with with nascent global standards. The combination of AI and distributed ledger technologies is, Jing suggested, setting a new baseline for efficiency, compliance, and innovation in financial services.

Business impact

AI and tokenisation are redefining how financial services operate. Jing described AI’s growing role in automating “data-rich and language-heavy” financial operations , including client interaction, compliance monitoring, and risk analysis. He predicted the rise of ‘AI account managers,’ which he described as agentic systems that provide personalised advisory services.

“Financial services are data-rich and language-heavy, relying on precise communication of abstract and complex products. Nevertheless, the pace of change is faster and faster. In the mid-term, we will be able to see the rise of full AI account managers supported by agentic systems,” Jing said.

Blockchain tokenisation is improving settlement speed and transparency, he said. Rather than enabling speculative trading, Jing described its role in regulated finance as cross-currency transactions that improve liquidity and reduce counter-party risk. The technologies together allow institutions to manage global operations with more precision and clearer auditability.

Hong Kong’s policy environment supports just such an evolution. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has created an experimental “GenAI Sandbox”, which allows banks to test AI-powered risk and fraud detection models. Ant Digital Technologies (AntDT), Ant’s digital subsidiary, is a participant in the Sandbox experiment, focusing on AI for unstructured data analytics and financial compliance.

Implementation & challenges

Ant Group’s recent initiatives show how large-scale collaboration between technology firms, regulators, and academia can accelerate financial transformation. In early 2025, AntDT launched a joint AI and Web3 laboratory with Hong Kong Polytechnic University to develop enterprise applications and talent pipelines for AI’s use in the financial sector. It also opened four digital technologies to local industry partners.

Under the moniker of Project Ensemble, Ant works with Standard Chartered and HSBC on liquidity management solutions that use the company’s Whale blockchain platform for multi-currency settlement. The collaboration aligns with Hong Kong’s goal of making regulated tokenisation an operational normality. Following the Sandbox trials, Ant International also co-developed HSBC’s first tokenised deposits solution for its corporate clients.

Ant International’s global wallet network Alipay+, AI-enabled payment and growth agents are reaching Hong Kong’s 4.5 million AlipayHK users and expanding into Southeast Asian markets. Aimed at enterprise clients, Ant’s WorldFirst platform supports 50,000 small and medium-sized e-commerce businesses, while its Antom service integrates payments and financing for the travel, digital, and EV sectors.

“Hong Kong has a lot of advantages as a GoGlobal centre for Chinese businesses; world-leading financial systems, outstanding professional services, and a pool of talents with global insights and knowledge,” Jing said.

Strategic takeaway

For financial technology leaders, Ant Group’s strategy in Hong Kong demonstrates how regulated AI and tokenisation can move from concept to deployment. Success of such deployment depends on technological capability and regulatory alignment working in concord.

Executives considering similar transformations should focus on four priorities:

1. Align AI and blockchain initiatives with regulatory frameworks.
2. Use consortium models to test interoperability and governance before full deployment.
3. Establish KPIs that measure efficiency, customer value, and cost reduction for cross-border workflows.
4. Investment in cross-functional teams is important, specifically in data, compliance, and product teams.

As Asia’s financial markets continue their digitisation explorations, Hong Kong’s AI-plus-tokenisation model may serve as a blueprint for balancing innovation with regulatory control. For regional leaders, the lesson is to follow the extent of measurable impact, enter into regulatory partnerships, and create scalable architecture that will help the financial technology mature.

(Image source: “Approaching Hong Kong over sea” by Inklaar is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.)

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