Ant Financial launches Ant Financial Technology, a new brand supporting the growth of financial institutions, at ATEC 2018 in Hangzhou, China. 

HANGZHOU, August 20, 2018 – Ant Financial Services Group (“Ant Financial” or “the Company”) today announced that the Company would open up a full suite of technology products and services under a new brand, Ant Financial Technology, to support the growth of financial institutions by improving user experience and lowering costs. 

Announcing the launch of the Ant Financial Technology brand at the 2018 Ant Technology Exploration Conference (ATEC) in Hangzhou, Xi HU, Deputy CTO of Ant Financial said, “Since our establishment in 2014, Ant Financial has focused on developing cutting edge technologies to enable inclusive finance. We are pleased that our technology products and services have already been used to improve efficiency and lower costs at approximately 200 financial institutions, including more than 100 banks, over 60 insurance companies, and more than 40 asset management firms and security brokers. Going forward, we will offer a full suite of technology products and services to power the growth of our financial institution partners and help them extend their services to more individuals.” 

Under the new brand, Ant Financial’s technology products and services consist of five product portfolios, namely large-scale financial transaction technologies, financial security technologies, financial intelligence technologies, next-generation interaction technologies and blockchain applications. 

These technologies have withstood the tests of some of the world’s most extreme use cases. For example, in the large-scale financial transaction portfolio, Alipay, Ant Financial’s mobile payment and lifestyle platform, was comfortably able to process a record breaking 256,000 payment transactions per second at the peak of the 2017 Singles’ Day Shopping Festival. 

Ant Financial’s technology solutions for financial institutions enable the delivery of services – from payments to wealth management – efficiently and at scale, and the Company’s institutional partners have realized concrete gains from implementing these solutions. For example, by implementing two of Ant Financial’s large-scale financial transaction technologies – SOFAStack (Scalable Open Financial Architecture), Ant’s financial grade distributed framework, and OceanBase, its financial distributed database – PICC Health Insurance increased its policy processing speed by a few thousand times, reduced daily reporting processing time from 4 hours to 6 minutes and shortened new product launch time by 80%. In addition, Bank of Nanjing also leveraged SOFAStack and OceanBase to expand its loan underwriting capacity to comfortably process one million loans per day, with an average processing speed of less than one second. 

Wenkai ZHOU, Vice President, Bank of Nanjing commented, “The rapid development of financial technology has had a profound impact on the traditional financial industry. To overcome some of the growth challenges of our business, we partnered with Ant Financial to build a distributed digital finance platform. This significantly enhanced our ability to underwrite loans and led us to expand our partnership in a number of other areas.” 

Financial institutions have increasingly recognized the ability of Ant Financial’s technology products and services to streamline operations. In June 2018, Ant Financial announced that it would share a full suite of AI capabilities with asset management companies to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs. In May 2018, banks including Huaxia Bank, China Everbright Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, China CITIC Bank, and Bank of Tianjin signed strategic cooperation agreements with Ant Financial to support the digital transformation of these banks. 

Ant Technology Exploration Conference (ATEC) is an annual flagship event that Ant Financial initiated in 2017. The conference brings together global partners and technology experts to explore frontier technologies and innovative ways of using technology to create positive impacts for society. The 2018 ATEC, which is being held in Hangzhou, will feature technology experts from leading financial institutions such as China Construction Bank, Citibank and China Everbright Bank.