Ant International announces its collaboration with HSBC

Ant International operates globally in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America as a digital payment and fintech provider. By collaborating with both private and public sectors, its tech-fin platform supports financial institutions and merchants.

The Tokenised Deposit Service provides real-time payments in HKD and USD between corporate wallets at HSBC Hong Kong. This service is a bank-led, blockchain-based settlement solution and follows a pilot with Ant International on the Whale platform. Ant International was one of the first clients to use the service, completing an instant intra-group fund transfer by digitising its USD deposits into digital tokens on HSBC's secure distributed ledger.

One of the flagship products crafted by the Platform Tech team within Ant International’s Embedded Finance division, the Whale platform serves as a management solution. It harnesses blockchain technology, incorporating encryption and artificial intelligence to increase the efficiency and transparency of fund transfers between Ant International’s internal entities, facilitating real-time global treasury management. In 2024, over one-third of Ant International’s transactions were processed on-chain using the Whale platform.

Key features of the Whale Platform

The advantages of the platform include: 

• Support for multiple tokenised assets: the Whale platform accommodates various tokenised assets from top banks and institutions globally, promoting interoperability across different blockchain networks;

• Advanced security measures: by utilising distributed ledger technologies such as homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs, the Whale platform safeguards transaction data and allows for multi-party verification in an encrypted form. This ensures that cross-chain transactions remain secure, confidential, and simplified.

Ant International's partnership with HSBC on tokenised deposits strengthens a collaboration that has been in place since 2020. In October 2024, both companies completed an HKD-denominated cross-bank experiment within the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's Ensemble Sandbox.