Global digital payment provider Ant International has announced its intentions to not only use artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline cross-border payments, but also to combat payment fraud.
The Singapore-based company is leveraging AI for a new foreign exchange solution that can predict rates on a daily and weekly basis, but also capabilities at an hourly rate too. It also looks to forecast inbound and outbound transactions, helping merchants reduce costs and reduce manual processing times.
AI has limitless potential in being able to significantly accelerate and streamline cross-border payments and Ant International CEO, Yang Peng, spoke on its importance with its new solution at the Singapore Fintech Festival this week.
He said: “Integration of AI into the processing of cross-border transactions is of critical importance to further strengthening global trade and commerce, especially for SMEs who up to now can’t afford real-time global settlement services.
“In deploying AI in merchant services, enhanced fraud detection and prevention against new scamming schemes like deepfaking is as important, if not more important, as increasing operational efficiency.”
The new AI-powered FX model also has the capacity to consolidate hundreds of existing models into a single, more accurate system. However, relying heavily on one model to process millions of daily transactions also introduces risks, warned Peng.
“We have safeguards in place to ensure human intervention if discrepancies arise between the new and old models. We avoid having blind faith in AI, maintaining checks to uphold accuracy,” he said.
AI fraud is increasing in prominence alongside the technology’s trajectory, which has financial service companies on high alert over its increasing usage and the unknown of its full capabilities.
A report this year from Signicat revealed that financial companies are unprepared for the looming threat of AI-fraud such as deepfakes due to factors like heightened consumer concern, the scale of criminal activity and the lack of skilled employees to combat it.
In response to this new fraud threat, Ant International announced it has developed a new anti-deepfake electronic Know Your Customer tool over the last two years. This tool aims to intercept at a 99% success rate.
With Ant International presiding over 100 million daily cross-border transactions for small businesses, the new anti-deepfake tool may prove vital to protect these small businesses as they more than likely will not have these next-generation anti-fraud tools available at their disposal.
Also this week, Ant International signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Tuesday with the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) to achieve 24/7 real-time transactions between Singapore and Malaysia.
