Ant International and Barclays Partner to Revolutionize Global Treasury Management with AI-Powered FX Model
Ant International, a global leader in financial technology, has partnered with Barclays, one of the UK’s leading banks, to enhance efficiency and resilience in global treasury management for businesses. At the heart of this collaboration is Ant International’s proprietary Time-Series Transformer (TST) AI FX Model, which forecasts cash flow and foreign exchange (FX) exposure with over 90% accuracy. This innovative solution helps businesses reduce FX-related costs and risks amid global market volatility, setting a new benchmark for FX risk management.
Transforming FX Management with AI
The partnership leverages Ant International’s cutting-edge TST Model, a transformer architecture-based big data model with nearly 2 billion parameters. By integrating advanced time-series forecasting algorithms, the TST Model predicts patterns over time, enabling businesses to forecast their cash flow and FX exposure on an hourly, daily, and weekly basis.
To enhance its predictive capabilities, Ant International developed new pre-training and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) frameworks. These innovations ensure the model continuously improves its accuracy, delivering reliable insights that empower businesses to make smarter financial decisions.
The TST Model’s precision reduces unnecessary hedging and risk premium costs from banks, lowering overall FX expenses. For Barclays, integrating the TST Model into its BARX NetFX platform—a tool widely used in the e-commerce and payment industries—has significantly improved the accuracy of FX exposure forecasts. This integration enables Barclays to offer more precise FX hedging solutions, optimize its platform’s efficiency, and pass cost savings on to clients like Ant International.
Real-World Impact: Reducing Costs and Enhancing Efficiency
At the initial stage of the collaboration, Ant International successfully completed its first batch of intra-group FX transactions with Barclays. Early results demonstrate the model’s potential to help businesses mitigate global FX volatility through AI-driven insights.
By leveraging the cost efficiencies achieved through Barclays’ enhanced platform, Ant International can provide competitive FX rates to its clients while maintaining relative price stability for major trading currencies, including the EUR and USD. Initial trial transactions have already shown significant reductions in FX costs for businesses, highlighting the tangible benefits of this partnership.
A Strategic Collaboration for the Future
Ben Parkinson, Head of Global Fintech & FX Automation Sales at Barclays, emphasized the significance of the collaboration: “Ant International has been a valued and long-standing partner of Barclays, and we were thrilled to work together on this innovative solution. Their state-of-the-art AI model has improved the accuracy of forecasting cash flows and helped us optimize 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, added: “The collaboration with Barclays on our Time-Series Transformer Model is an important milestone in our ongoing journey to help treasuries optimize their FX strategies. The results we’ve 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, enabling more efficient FX transactions. It also shows how enhancing our treasury management can benefit our customers when businesses translate cost efficiencies into competitive FX rates.”
Pushkaraj Gumaste, Head of Corporate Banking, Asia Pacific & Middle East at Barclays, highlighted the broader implications of the partnership: “This collaboration is a strong testament to how Barclays is dedicated to evolving alongside our partners, harnessing our complementary strengths to enhance our offerings and deliver more impactful solutions. 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.”
Addressing the Growing Demand for Efficient FX Solutions
With global cross-border transactions projected to exceed $290 trillion by 2030, businesses face increasing pressure to manage FX risks effectively. Traditional methods often fall short in addressing the complexities of volatile currency markets, making AI-powered solutions like the TST Model indispensable.
Currently, the collaboration supports major currency pairings used by Ant International, such as the EUR/USD. However, both companies are committed to expanding the solution to cover additional currencies and meet the diverse needs of businesses worldwide. This expansion will further solidify Ant International and Barclays’ leadership in providing innovative, scalable FX solutions.
Why This Partnership Matters
The collaboration between Ant International and Barclays represents a transformative step forward in global treasury management. By combining Ant International’s AI-driven forecasting capabilities with Barclays’ banking expertise, the partnership delivers unparalleled accuracy, efficiency, and cost savings in FX hedging.
For businesses operating in today’s fast-paced global economy, managing FX risks is critical to maintaining profitability and competitiveness. The TST Model empowers treasuries to make data-driven decisions, reducing uncertainty and enabling them to focus on strategic growth initiatives.
Moreover, the partnership underscores the importance of innovation in addressing real-world challenges. As businesses increasingly rely on digital tools to navigate complex financial landscapes, collaborations like this set a new standard for how technology can be harnessed to drive meaningful impact.
