SINGAPORE __ Ant International has entered a partnership with leading UK bank Barclays to enhance efficiency and resilience in global treasury management for businesses. Under the partnership, the two sides will combine innovative solutions, including Ant’s proprietary Time-Series Transformer (TST) AI FX Model, to help businesses reduce FX-related costs and risks against global volatilities.

At the initial stage of the collaboration, Ant International has successfully completed the first batch of its intra-group FX transactions with Barclays.

Ant International’s TST Model is a transformer architecture-based big data model with close to 2 billion parameters. By integrating the latest time series forecasting algorithms, the TST Model predicts patterns over time. Ant also created new pre-training and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) frameworks to train the model and improve its predictions over time.

The TST Model now forecasts the company's cashflow and FX exposure on an hourly, daily and weekly basis, with 90%+ accuracy. This enables more accurate predictions of trading volumes and reduces unnecessary hedging and risk premium costs from banks, thereby lowering its hedging costs and overall FX costs.

Barclays integrated the TST Model into its FX hedging platform, BARX NetFX, which broadly serves the e-commerce and payment industries. This collaboration is part of Barclays’ FX Automation strategy, which focuses on developing tools that help their clients digitise workflows and optimise FX hedging.

By integrating the TST Model into its Guaranteed FX solution, Barclays enhances its BARX NetFX platform, resulting in greater accuracy in forecasting Ant International’s FX exposures. This in turn, enables the bank to offer more precise FX hedging, lower its hedging costs, and increase the overall efficiency of its platform. Ant International then leverages this cost efficiency in its FX quotes for businesses, offering competitive rates and maintaining relative price stability for major trading currencies including EUR and USD. Initial trial transactions already saw Ant International helping its clients saving on FX costs.

Ant International’s use case with Barclays highlights the TST Model’s potential for helping businesses mitigate global FX volatility through AI.

“Ant International has been a valued and long-standing partner of Barclays, and we were thrilled to work together on this innovative solution,” said Ben Parkinson, Head of Global Fintech & FX Automation Sales at Barclays. “This collaboration reflects the strong relationship and mutual trust between our teams. Their state-of-the-art AI model has improved the accuracy of forecasting cash flows and helped us optimise the FX hedging process. By combining Ant International’s advanced AI forecasting capabilities with our market-leading FX expertise, we’ve been able to reduce uncertainty and cost, setting a new benchmark for FX risk management.”

Kelvin Li, General Manager of Platform Tech at Ant International, said: “The collaboration with Barclays on our Time Series Transformer Model is an important milestone in our ongoing journey to help treasuries optimise their FX strategies. The results that we have achieved by combining Barclays’ advanced banking capabilities with Ant International’s innovative solutions demonstrate how technology can enhance the way businesses manage their global liquidity, by enabling more efficient FX transactions. It also shows how enhancing our treasury management can benefit our customers, when businesses translate the cost efficiencies into competitive FX rates.”

“This collaboration is a strong testament to how Barclays is dedicated to evolving alongside our partners, by harnessing our complementary strengths to enhance our offerings and deliver more impactful solutions,” said Pushkaraj Gumaste, Head of Corporate Banking, Asia Pacific & Middle East, Barclays. “It's a perfect example of how we can make cross-border business more seamless and efficient for our clients, while deepening the value we bring to their global operations.”

With global cross-border transactions set to reach over US$290 trillion by 2030, Ant International and Barclays recognise the need for innovative FX solutions that will allow businesses to transact more seamlessly and securely. While the use case currently supports major currency pairings used by Ant International, both companies aim to enhance the solution to cover more currencies and serve more business needs.