Ant International partners with Barclays

Ant International is a global provider of digital payments and financial technology, offering a unified techfin platform to improve commerce. The company collaborates with partners to support merchants of all sizes achieve growth through a wide array of tech-driven digital payment and financial services solutions.

Through this collaboration, the two parties will merge solutions, including Ant’s proprietary Time-Series Transformer (TST) AI FX Model. This initiative aims to assist businesses in minimising FX-related costs and risks linked to global market fluctuations.

In the early phase of this partnership, Ant International has effectively completed its first set of intra-group FX transactions with Barclays.

About the TST Model and benefits

Ant International’s TST Model is a big data model built on transformer architecture, featuring nearly 2 billion parameters. By integrating advanced time series forecasting algorithms, the TST Model identifies patterns over time. Additionally, Ant has introduced new pre-training and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) frameworks that increase the model's training and predictive accuracy.

The TST Model now offers forecasts for the company's cash flow and foreign exchange (FX) exposure on an hourly, daily, and weekly basis, achieving over 90% accuracy. This capability enables more precise predictions of trading volumes, which helps reduce unnecessary hedging and risk premium costs charged by banks, ultimately lowering overall hedging and FX expenses.

Barclays has incorporated the TST Model into its FX hedging platform, BARX NetFX, as part of its FX Automation strategy aimed at digitising workflows and optimising FX hedging for clients. This integration increases the accuracy of forecasting FX exposures for Ant International, allowing Barclays to offer more precise FX hedging and reduced costs. As a result, Ant International can provide competitive FX quotes and maintain price stability for major currencies such as the euro (EUR) and the US dollar (USD), leading to cost savings for its clients. This collaboration highlights the TST Model's potential to assist businesses in managing global FX volatility through AI.