Standard Chartered is pushing further into payments innovation, joining Swift and Ant International to trial bank-to-wallet transfers while also rolling out treasury tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI)
The bank announced earlier today that it has begun live production trials with Swift and Ant that connect Standard Chartered customer accounts to e-wallets in the Alipay+ network. The first transactions have already been processed, using ISO 20022 messaging and Swift’s infrastructure.
The initiative seeks to simplify global money transfers by linking 11,500 financial institutions across more than 200 markets on Swift to 1.7 billion user accounts on 36 wallets supported by Alipay+, especially in fast-growing Asian growing markets.
“[These trials] are a testament to the versatility of our banking platform and our strategic relationship with both Swift and Ant International. We will continue to push the boundaries of finance to shape the future of our industry, securely and in compliance with regulatory requirements,” says Michael Spiegel, Standard Chartered’s global head of transaction banking.
According to Jacques Xu, Ant International’s general manager of global remittance, the move was a “ground-breaking multilateral collaboration… to build a more connected financial ecosystem with higher standards of transparency and security”.
Meanwhile, Kevin Wong, Swift’s chief executive for Asia Pacific, describes the collaboration as “a step toward faster, frictionless payments across multiple networks”, which will address consumers' and businesses' demand for more choices in their international payments experience.
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New treasury and FX solution powered by AI
Besides the payment trials, Standard Chartered and Ant International are also co-developing an AI-powered treasury and foreign-exchange (FX) management solution.
The solution integrates Ant’s Falcon Time-Series Transformer model with Standard Chartered’s Aggregated Liquidity Engine, or SCALE, to forecast FX exposures with more than 90% accuracy. This, in turn, allows the bank to manage its FX risk more effectively and lower the client’s FX hedging cost in real-time and 24/7.
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The integrated solution is part of Standard Chartered's FX Automation Programme, which is designed to support the multi-currency booking and international vendor settlement needs in real time and 24/7. This helps businesses mitigate costs and FX volatility when transacting across borders.
“Our latest collaboration with Ant International sets the path for an innovative approach to managing and hedging FX risk and costs for Ant International and its clients globally. We are looking forward to further expand our collaboration with Ant International and continue to shape the future of Treasury Management,” says Madhu Menon, Global Head of SC PrismFX Sales at Standard Chartered.
Ant International’s Falcon TST Model Ant International’s Falcon TST Model uses AI to spot patterns in vast amounts of historical data and predict future cashflow and FX exposures. This helps businesses improve the efficiency and accuracy of their cash flow and FX exposure forecasts, allowing them to reduce hedging and overall FX costs.
The model, which runs on nearly 2 billion parameters, now forecasts Ant’s cashflow and FX exposures with over 90% accuracy on an hourly, daily and weekly basis. It already covers more than 60% of Ant’s FX-related transactions, lowering FX costs by up to 60% and liquidity management expenses by as much as 50%.
