Ant International has partnered with leading British bank Barclays to improve the efficiency and resilience of global treasury management for corporates. The partnership will combine innovative solutions, including Ant’s proprietary Time-Series Transformer (TST) AI FX model, to help companies reduce their FX-related costs and risks in the face of global volatility.
In the initial phase of the cooperation, Ant International successfully completed the first tranche of its intra-group foreign exchange transactions with Barclays.
Ant International’s TST model is a big data model based on a transformer architecture with nearly 2 billion parameters. By integrating the latest time series forecasting algorithms, the TST model predicts patterns over time. Ant also developed 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 cash flow and foreign exchange risk hourly, daily, and weekly with over 90% accuracy. This enables more accurate trading volume forecasts and reduces unnecessary hedging and risk premium costs from banks, thereby lowering hedging costs and overall FX costs.
Barclays has integrated the TST model into its BARX NetFX FX hedging platform, which primarily serves the e-commerce and payments industries. This collaboration is part of Barclays’ FX automation strategy, which focuses on developing tools to help clients digitize their workflows and optimize their FX hedging.
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By integrating the TST model into its Guaranteed FX solution, Barclays is enhancing its BARX NetFX platform, achieving greater accuracy in forecasting Ant International’s foreign exchange risks. This, in turn, enables the bank to offer more precise foreign exchange hedges, reduce its hedging costs, and increase the overall efficiency of its platform. Ant International subsequently leverages these cost efficiencies for its corporate FX rates, offering competitive rates and ensuring relative price stability across major trading currencies, including the EUR and USD. Ant International has already delivered FX cost savings to its clients in initial test transactions.
Ant International’s use case at Barclays demonstrates the potential of the TST model to help companies mitigate global exchange rate fluctuations using AI.
“Ant International is a valued and long-standing partner of Barclays, and we were delighted to collaborate on this innovative solution,” explained Ben Parkinson, Head of Global Fintech & FX Automation Sales at Barclays . “This collaboration reflects the close relationship and mutual trust between our teams. Their cutting-edge AI model has improved the accuracy of cash flow forecasts and helped us optimize the FX hedging process. By combining Ant International’s advanced AI forecasting capabilities with our market-leading FX expertise, we have been able to reduce uncertainty and costs, setting a new benchmark for FX risk management.
Kelvin Li, General Manager of Platform Technology at Ant International , said: “Collaborating with Barclays on our Time Series Transformer Model is an important milestone in our journey to help treasury departments optimize their foreign exchange strategies. The results we’ve achieved by combining Barclays’ advanced banking services with Ant International’s innovative solutions demonstrate how technology can improve how companies manage their global liquidity by enabling more efficient foreign exchange transactions. It also demonstrates how improving our treasury management can benefit our clients as companies translate cost savings into competitive exchange rates.”
“This collaboration is a strong demonstration of Barclays’ commitment to evolving alongside its partners, leveraging our complementary strengths to enhance our offering and deliver more impactful solutions,” said Pushkaraj Gumaste, Head of Corporate Banking, Asia Pacific & Middle East, Barclays. “This is an excellent example of how we can make cross-border business smoother and more efficient for our clients, while further enhancing the value we deliver to their global operations.”
With global cross-border transaction volume expected to exceed USD 290 trillion by 2030, Ant International and Barclays recognize the need for innovative foreign exchange solutions that enable businesses to conduct more seamless and secure transactions. Currently, the solution supports the major currency pairs used by Ant International. However, both companies aim to expand the solution to cover additional currencies and meet more business needs.
Source: BusinessWire