Payment Expert’s Fintech Unwrapped delivers the latest developing news that has shaped the sector over the past week.
This week, Ant International launched close to 100 AI-native products across payment, account, FX, treasury and growth operations, its largest product upgrade to date, at its VOYAGE merchant event in Shanghai.
Also this week, Circle switched on its Arc blockchain mainnet with BlackRock and Visa among its founding validators, Grab agreed a $1.49bn deal for a majority stake in BNPL platform Atome, Bottomline launched Global Pay Connect alongside a Chainlink collaboration, Portage closed a $600mn fintech fund, PayNearMe acquired AI firm Marr Labs, and Wells Fargo added international transfers to its mobile app.
Ant International builds its financial stack around AI
Ant International launched a full stack of AI-native products for payment, account, FX, treasury and growth operations at its VOYAGE merchant event in Shanghai on 18 September, the company’s largest product upgrade to date.
The suite runs to close to 100 products across four business pillars — Alipay+, Antom, WorldFirst and Bettr — and is built on two proprietary models: the Antom 3-in-1 Transformer, a payment model with more than 10bn parameters, and FalconTST, an FX and liquidity forecasting model with more than 8.5bn parameters.
Antom, Ant International’s merchant payment service, said 89.5% of its merchants have deployed AI agents and 81.4% of payment tasks were aided by AI over the past 12 months. FalconTST reduced companies’ FX hedging and allocation costs by 30% to 60% in live cases, Ant said.
The launch includes WorldFirst’s Account for Agent, which Ant International described as the first agentic account built for businesses. Ant International links 150mn merchants to more than 2bn consumer accounts, with daily transactions above 25mn across 210 markets.
Peng Yang, CEO of Ant International, told 1,100 executives at the event that the future fintech leader needs “a future-ready trust infrastructure and foundational FinAI models” alongside “a full stack of connected AI-native solutions across payment, account, FX, treasury and growth operations.”
Circle switches on Arc with BlackRock and Visa as validators
Circle launched the mainnet of Arc, a Layer-1 blockchain it built for financial markets, real-time money movement and agentic activity, on 16 September.
Arc went live with native integration into Circle’s platform, including the USDC stablecoin, and a founding validator group of BlackRock, the DTCC, Standard Chartered and Visa. More than 100 applications and more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders were live at launch, spanning banks, asset managers, payment networks, exchanges, custodians, DeFi protocols, wallets and AI platforms, Circle said.
Circle cited six design choices it said separate Arc from a standard blockchain: gas fees paid in USDC rather than volatile tokens, instant settlement, opt-in privacy, interoperability, support for agentic activity, and institutional security. Arc competes with Stripe‘s Tempo and Google Cloud‘s Universal Ledger for institutional adoption.
Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, said Arc is “an open, neutral, always-on economic operating system for the internet” that is “built for a world where both people and machines transact.”
Grab buys majority stake in BNPL platform Atome for $1.49bn
Grab agreed to buy a 60% stake in buy now, pay later provider Atome Financial for $1.49bn in cash, the Singapore-based company said.
Atome operates in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand and has 25mn cumulative transacted users. Standard Chartered invested $500mn in the platform in 2021.
The deal combines Atome’s lending business — BNPL loans, consumer cash loans, BNPL cards and digital lending — with Grab’s payments, digital banks, partner lending, insurance and consumer lending operations. The acquisition is expected to close by the third quarter of 2027. Grab has agreed to buy the remaining 40% two years after that under a performance-linked framework valuing Atome at between $2bn and $4.5bn.
Alex Hungate, President and COO of Grab, said the deal “accelerates the growth and profitability of our financial services segment by deepening our consumer lending capabilities.”
Bottomline launches Global Pay Connect and ties up with Chainlink
Bottomline launched Global Pay Connect, a software-as-a-service payment messaging platform, on 17 September, and entered a Strategic Collaboration Agreement with blockchain firm Chainlink.
The platform gives financial institutions connectivity across Swift, SEPA, SIC, Bacs, CHAPS, CHIPS, Lynx, EBICS and host-to-host networks, with ISO 20022 transformation, payment data enrichment and fraud prevention in one system. The Chainlink agreement lets banks connect to multiple blockchain networks through a single integration using their existing Bottomline connectivity.
Bottomline research found 40% of CFOs cite outdated infrastructure as the biggest barrier to adopting real-time payments, and 28% describe SaaS adoption across their institution as modern, API-enabled and end-to-end.
Vitus Rotzer, Global Head of Banking GTM at Bottomline, said the challenge “has moved from connecting to payment networks, towards institutions needing infrastructure that can adapt to real-time payments.” Johann Eid, Chief Business Officer at Chainlink Labs, said the tie-up lets banks “access onchain payment rails through a single, network-agnostic connection.”
PayNearMe acquires AI firm Marr Labs
PayNearMe acquired the technology assets of Marr Labs and hired its key employees, the payments company said. Marr Labs builds agentic AI to automate voice, messaging and workflows in regulated environments.
PayNearMe, founded in 2009, processes more than $50bn in payments a year, with more than 20,000 businesses using its PayXM platform. Marr Labs was founded in 2023 and backed by Y Combinator; its team includes people who worked on early Siri products, and its technology supported millions of customer interactions a month across financial services firms, PayNearMe said.
Danny Shader, Founder and CEO of PayNearMe, said the Marr Labs team “has proven its ability to build and deploy sophisticated AI systems at massive scale.”
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