Ant International has announced the appointment of Jiang-Ming Yang as its new Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) to support its international growth plans.
Starting his role effective immediately, Yang will support Ant International’s product and technology teams and lead the CIO Organisation, responsible for the company’s global innovation projects and product strategy.
Yang will oversee the development of products and solutions, assessing and maintaining global market trends and customer needs.
He commented on his new role, stating: “Ant International will continue to invest at the frontier of innovation to help businesses, especially SMEs, to achieve sustainable growth in an increasingly complex global environment.
“Top on our list of priorities will be to push the cost and efficiency boundary for cross-border payment and settlement; to democratise cutting-edge technology solutions for SMEs on payment, trade and financial services; and to revolutionise user experience with new intelligent technology for cross-border travel.”
Back in December, Ant International CEO, Peng Yang, announced an organisational and strategic upgrade to its AI-powered offerings and fintech solutions to support growth amongst small and medium-sized enterprises.
The company likely hopes that Jiang-Ming Yang’s background will make a good contribution to these plans. Yang has prior experience of supporting fintech and digital payment growth amongst SMEs during his prior role at Ant International as its Chief Product Officer.
He prioritised four key pillars to help drive customer success and enhance operational efficiency amongst small businesses; unified digital mobile payment adoption, unified payment services for merchants, unified account service for SMEs, and embedded finance services for liquidity management.
Regarding Ant International’s recent AI activity, the company launched a new digital tool last year to help streamline cross-border payments and combat against the rise of AI-related fraud, such as deepfakes.
Ant International’s CEO has stated that there is “critical importance” in using AI to accelerate cross-border transactions to combat fraud attacks, as fraudsters are also making extensive use of AI.
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.”
