Ant Financial Services Group, the payments and financial services arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, has launched a new suite of fintech products and services targeted at financial institutions and banks. Under the Ant Financial Technology brand, the firm will provide products and services under five product portfolios: large-scale financial transaction technologies, financial security technologies, financial intelligence technologies, next-generation interaction technologies and blockchain applications.
Ant Financial Technology was launched at the 2018 Ant Technology Exploration Conference (ATEC) in Hangzhou, an annual flagship event aimed at bringing together global partners and technology experts.
Announcing[1] the initiative, Xi Hu, deputy CTO of Ant Financial, said:
“Since our establishment in 2014, Ant Financial has focused on developing cutting edge technologies to enable inclusive finance. We are pleased that our technology products and services have already been used to improve efficiency and lower costs at approximately 200 financial institutions, including more than 100 banks, over 60 insurance companies, and more than 40 asset management firms and security brokers.
“Going forward, we will offer a full suite of technology products and services to power the growth of our financial institution partners and help them extend their services to more individuals.”
PICC Health Insurance has implemented two of Ant Financial’s large-scale financial technologies: Scalable Open Financial Architecture (SOFAStack), a financial grade distributed framework, and OceanBase, a financial distributed database. Ant Financial claims these have allowed the firm to increase its policy processing speed by a few thousand times, reduce daily reporting processing time from 4 hours to 6 minutes and shorten new product launch time by 80%.
Bank of Nanjing too is leveraging SOFAStack and OceanBase.
