Ant Financial participated in Money20/20 Asia industry event, where chief technology officer and chief operations officer of global business group, Cheng Li presented the opening keynote speech to an audience of 1800 gathered at the city state.

Equal opportunities

Citing the examples of a herdsman and a small merchant whose store is located at the foot of Mount Everest 5200m above sea level, Cheng went on to explain how technology is pathing the way for such communities to now enjoy financial services that were previously closed to them.

When China started moving into the mobile age a few years ago, Ant Financial began looking at improving offline payment options so that small merchants who could not afford expensive point-of-sales systems can enjoy efficient, cheap and secure payment too.

This gave birth to the use of what is now a familiar sight in many of China’s highly-developed cashless cities – scanning QR codes. Using only simple but highly efficient and secure technologies, Ant Financial has enabled even the smallest of merchants to accept payment, anywhere, anytime.

B.A.S.I.C

Speaking on the B.A.S.I.C that forms the building blocks of Ant’s technologies, Cheng went on to explain the importance of each: blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), security, Internet of Things, and computing as Ant rolled out one new product after another, guided by its mission of bringing equal opportunities through technology.

From using blockchain as the new trust mechanism to improve the transparency and traceability of e-commerce supply chains or charity funds, to using artificial intelligence to reduce Ant’s payment risk to less than one in one million, or answering millions of customer inquiries a day, Ant is showing how new technology can be applied to their business to solve previously challenging issues.

Future challenges

While Cheng remained positive of the future, there are challenges that lie ahead. With increasingly connected intelligent things generating huge IoT data stream, one of Ant’s biggest challenges is making machines understand the ultra-complex financial system well enough to provide financial services in a more efficient and inclusive way.