Ant Financial announced a new brand, Ant Financial Technology, specific to financial institutions, which will have a portfolio of five products: large-scale financial transaction technologies, financial security technologies, financial intelligence technologies, next-generation interaction technologies and blockchain applications.
Xi Hu, deputy CTO of Ant Financial said that since the establishment of the Group, it’s focused on “cutting-edge technologies to enable inclusive finance”. Ant’s technology products and services have been used by some 200 financial institutions, including more than 100 banks, over 60 insurance companies, and more than 40 asset management firms and security brokers, Hu added.
These technologies have withstood some extreme tests, for example, in the large-scale financial transaction portfolio, Alipay, Ant Financial’s mobile payment and lifestyle platform, processed 256,000 payment transactions per second at a selling peak.
Also, by implementing two of Ant Financial’s large-scale financial transaction technologies – SOFAStack (Scalable Open Financial Architecture), Ant’s financial grade distributed framework, and OceanBase, its financial distributed database – PICC Health Insurance increased its policy processing speed by a few thousand times, reduced daily reporting processing time from 4 hours to 6 minutes and shortened new product launch time by 80%. In addition, Bank of Nanjing also leveraged SOFAStack and OceanBase to expand its loan underwriting capacity to comfortably process one million loans per day, with an average processing speed of less than one second.
In June 2018, Ant Financial announced that it would share a full suite of AI capabilities with asset management companies to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs. In May 2018, banks including Huaxia Bank, China Everbright Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, China CITIC Bank, and Bank of Tianjin signed strategic cooperation agreements with Ant Financial to support the digital transformation of these banks.