Inside the Ant International Treasury Platform that is Rewiring Global Liquidity

Ant International used to be focused on moving money faster. Now, it is also quietly rebuilding the plumbing of corporate treasury.

Over the past two years the company has spun out of Ant Group, reorganised into four business pillars: Alipay+ for wallet acceptance, Antom for merchant acquiring, WorldFirst for SME trade accounts, and an Embedded Finance arm branded as Bettr, and then started stitching all of that together with a blockchain‑based treasury network and a large‑scale AI forecasting model.

For global treasurers and banks, this is a live experiment in what happens when you take tokenised bank liabilities, real‑time liquidity, and AI‑driven FX risk management, and run them at the scale of a firm that touches 1.8 billion users, 100 million merchants and over a trillion dollars in annual payment flows.

This is the emerging Ant treasury stack: Whale as the blockchain backbone, Bettr as the commercial wrapper, and Falcon TST as the AI brain.

From Ant Financial to Ant International’s treasury stack

When Ant Group carved out Ant International in 2024, the story was pitched as a straightforward internationalisation move: Singapore headquarters, focus on cross‑border payments and SME finance outside mainland China.

Under that umbrella, the Embedded Finance division now plays a bigger role than the branding suggests. According to Ant, Embedded Finance already serves more than 11 million underserved SMEs and individuals in Southeast and South Asia with FX, treasury management and lending solutions, leveraging AI‑powered risk models.

Bettr sits inside this division as the client‑facing brand for:

• Real‑time Treasury Management Solutions
• Settlement Token (a tokenised e‑money instrument)
• Financing, embedded finance, and “credit tech” services targeted at platforms and merchants.

The key difference versus a traditional bank TMS is that Bettr is built on Ant’s own treasury infrastructure, not just on top of a single bank’s balance sheet.

Whale: a multi-bank, blockchain‑based treasury network

At the core of that infrastructure is Whale, which Ant describes as its “next‑generation treasury management solution” using blockchain, advanced encryption and artificial intelligence to control fund movements between bank accounts.

A few design choices make Whale stand out:

24/7 intragroup liquidity with tokenised deposits

Rather than pushing end‑of‑day wires between entities, Ant works with multiple banks to tokenise deposits and move those tokens on permissioned ledgers:

• DBS has issued “Treasury Tokens” – tokenised claims on DBS deposits and integrated its permissioned blockchain directly with Whale so Ant can manage intragroup liquidity on a 24/7 basis.
• HSBC has launched a Tokenised Deposit Service in Hong Kong for Ant, allowing HKD and USD deposits to be converted into on‑ledger tokens. Whale then orchestrates real‑time, always‑on corporate payments using those tokens, following a pilot under the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s Project Ensemble sandbox.
• UBS has signed an MoU with Ant to use tokenised deposits for real‑time, multi‑currency treasury payments, explicitly citing Whale as the blockchain system enabling 24/7 settlement “without traditional payment cut‑off constraints.”

In each case, the deposits remain at the bank; what moves across chains are tokenised representations controlled by smart contracts and Whale’s rule engine.

Multi‑bank, on‑chain by default

Ant says that in 2024 more than one‑third of its global transactions were processed on‑chain through Whale, on volumes around US$1 trillion

Those tokenised flows span at least ten major banks, including DBS, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, UBS and Banking Circle.

For Ant, this turns liquidity management into a multi‑bank pool on a single technical rail, rather than a jumble of bank‑specific portals and cut‑off times.

Crypto-secure by default

Whale leans heavily on homomorphic encryption and zero‑knowledge proofs so that transaction data can be encrypted end‑to‑end yet still validated across banks and chains which is a critical capability when you start moving tokenised balances across jurisdictions with strict data‑protection rules.

In a joint project with HSBC and Swift, Ant has also shown that its tokenised deposits can be triggered via standard ISO 20022 messages over Swift’s network, preserving existing AML and sanctions‑screening frameworks.

All told, Whale has become a corporate TMS front‑end with a blockchain‑native treasury rail that sits between Ant’s entities and its banking partners.

Bettr: commercialising Ant’s treasury infrastructure

Bettr takes those capabilities and packages them for external use.

On its own site, Bettr advertises “Real-time Treasury Management Solutions” that help businesses manage treasury operations with blockchain‑based and AI‑powered solutions, plus a Settlement Token designed for secure wholesale payments within Ant’s global operations.

Two building blocks matter here.

1. Real-time Treasury Management Solutions

Bettr’s treasury offering is targeted at sectors with intense cross‑border flows — airlines, banking and finance, cross‑border trade, e‑commerce platforms and online travel agents.

Under the hood, these solutions draw on Whale for:

• 24/7 liquidity between accounts and entities
• On‑chain settlement for certain cross‑border and intra‑group flows
• Programmable rules around pooling and sweeping, enabled by the programmable nature of treasury tokens at banks like DBS.

And they draw on Ant’s Falcon TST AI model (more on that next) for:

• FX and cash‑flow forecasting
• Scenario analysis across currencies and time horizons
• Automated recommendations on hedging and funding.

2. Bettr Settlement Token

The Bettr Settlement Token is where Ant’s tokenisation strategy intersects with the regulatory debate around stablecoins and tokenised bank money.

Alipay Europe has obtained a MiCA electronic money token licence in the EU and will use it not to issue a retail stablecoin, but to run the Bettr Settlement Token as a wholesale settlement asset between Ant affiliates in Europe.

In Ant’s own materials, the Settlement Token is described simply as tokenised e‑money for wholesale payments and settlements across Ant International’s operations, not a consumer coin.

At the same time, Ant is “seriously considering” fiat‑referenced stablecoin licences in Hong Kong, Singapore and Luxembourg, with executives emphasising that any stablecoin would be used to enhance global payments rather than speculative crypto activity.

Taken together, Bettr is positioning itself as a tokenised money layer tightly bound to bank deposits and e‑money, rather than a crypto‑native stablecoin play.

Falcon TST: AI forecasting for cash and FX

The third leg of Ant’s treasury stack is Falcon TST — a Time‑Series Transformer model built to predict cash flows and FX exposures.

Ant says Falcon TST is a transformer‑architecture big‑data model with close to 2 billion parameters (some commentary now puts that closer to 2.5 billion) trained on large historical time‑series datasets and sector‑specific signals.

In production, Ant reports that Falcon:

• Forecasts cashflow and currency exposure with more than 90% accuracy, on hourly, daily and weekly horizons.
• Can reduce liquidity and FX‑related costs by up to 60% in some scenarios, according to comments by Ant International’s CEO at the Singapore FinTech Festival.

Falcon is embedded in several concrete bank and corporate offerings:

• Citi has integrated Falcon with its Fixed FX Rates solution, which supports more than 70 currencies and is widely used by airlines and major e‑commerce merchants. An initial airline client in Asia has seen hedging costs cut by about 30% on online ticket sales, according to Citi and Reuters.
• Standard Chartered has combined Falcon with its SCALE FX liquidity engine, initially to manage Ant’s own FX exposures with over 90% accuracy, with plans to roll the joint solution out to corporate clients.
• Barclays is working with Ant to incorporate Falcon into BARX NetFX as part of a global treasury management collaboration, improving its own forecasting and the pricing it can offer to clients.

In November 2025, Ant went a step further and open‑sourced Falcon TST, making the model available on GitHub and Hugging Face — a rare move for a commercial fintech running sensitive treasury operations.

For treasurers, the practical implication is simple: Falcon is turning FX and cashflow forecasting from a spreadsheet art into something that looks more like systematic quant modelling.

What Ant’s treasury platform actually does

Put these layers together and you get a stack that covers the full treasury cycle.

1. Cash and liquidity management

Whale gives Ant and its partners the ability to:

• Move liquidity 24/7 between entities and banks using tokenised deposits with DBS, HSBC, UBS and others.
• Treat those deposits as programmable objects: DBS emphasises “programmable, fractionalised and atomic value transfer” via its Treasury Tokens, which Whale can orchestrate in line with internal liquidity rules.
• Consolidate positions across multiple banks onto a single technical rail while still leaving balances at each institution.

2. FX and risk management

Falcon and Bettr provide:

• Forecasts of cash inflows and outflows by currency and time horizon, with >90% accuracy in live deployments.
• Integration with banks’ FX engines (Citi Fixed FX Rates, Barclays BARX, SC SCALE, Deutsche Bank’s FX platforms) to translate forecasts into guaranteed rates or hedging strategies.
• Experiments with tokenised deposits and stablecoins for cross‑border treasury, reserve management and on/off‑ramps, as highlighted in Deutsche Bank’s strategic partnership with Ant.

3. Collections and settlement for specific verticals

Ant’s treasury stack is already embedded in a handful of use cases:

Who is actually using Ant’s treasury stack?

Three groups stand out.

1. Ant itself

Ant International is Whale’s anchor client:

• Its Platform Tech team says that in 2024, over one‑third of Ant’s global transactions were processed on‑chain via Whale, validating the platform at scale.
• Those flows support Ant’s four pillar businesses: Alipay+, Antom, WorldFirst and Bettr and give it real‑world telemetry on how tokenised liquidity behaves across multiple banks and corridors.

Internal usage at this scale is usually the hardest part of any treasury technology rollout. Ant has effectively used its own balance sheet as the testbed.

2. Banks and infrastructure providers

The list of financial institutions plugged into Whale and Bettr is now long:

• DBS (Treasury Tokens and broader Alipay+ partnership).
• HSBC and Hang Seng Bank (Tokenised Deposit Service, HKD sandbox transfers, and a Swift‑based cross‑border PoC).
• Standard Chartered (HKD and SGD test settlements via Whale; FX automation joint solution with Falcon).
• Deutsche Bank (first German bank to integrate Whale for intragroup transfers; broader partnership on tokenised deposits, stablecoins and TST‑based FX models).
• UBS (Digital Cash tokenised deposits linked to Whale for real‑time multi‑currency treasury payments).
• Banking Circle, which is co‑developing tokenised deposit infrastructure with Ant, emphasising privacy‑preserving cryptography for GDPR‑sensitive flows.
• Citi, Barclays and Standard Chartered on the AI side, integrating Falcon into their FX products as described above.

For these banks, Ant is both a large treasury customer and a technology partner whose stack they can co‑brand into their own corporate offerings.

3. Corporates and SMEs

External usage is still concentrated in specific verticals, but it is growing:

• Capital A / AirAsia is the flagship airline client, using Falcon TST to manage multicurrency cash flows and FX exposure. Public case studies and trade press report hedging cost reductions of up to 40% and improved price stability.
• Citi and Ant cite an unnamed major Asian carrier in their joint pilot, where hedging costs fell by around 30% in initial live transactions.
• WorldFirst, Ant’s SME cross‑border account provider, serves 1.2–1.5 million customers, enabling payments in more than 100 currencies across over 210 countries. Those SMEs consume treasury and FX services exposed through WorldFirst’s account interface rather than directly via Bettr.
• Bettr’s inclusive credit and embedded‑finance services reach around 11 million micro‑businesses and individuals in markets such as Bangladesh and Indonesia, where the same AI and treasury tools support SME lending and cash‑flow smoothing.

The numbers are still small versus the global TMS market, but they are meaningful in the context of a treasury platform that is only a couple of years old and grew out of internal tooling.

Why this matters for global treasury

Ant International’s treasury platform is important not because it proves blockchain is the future of everything, but because it offers concrete answers to questions treasurers everywhere are asking:

• How do I get 24/7 liquidity across multiple banks without sacrificing control or compliance?
• Can I use tokenised bank liabilities for real production flows, not just pilots?
• How do I make FX hedging and cash‑flow planning less art and more science, especially in volatile markets?
• What is the right balance between stablecoins, tokenised deposits and e‑money tokens for wholesale settlement?

Whale, Bettr and Falcon do not necessarily represent the only answer. Western banks and TMS vendors are experimenting in similar directions. But Ant is showing what it looks like when you run those experiments at scale, across:

• A multi‑bank network of tokenised deposits
• Over a trillion dollars of annual flows, a third of which are already on‑chain
• An AI engine that has been battle‑tested on airline P&L.

For treasurers, the immediate takeaway is not “rip and replace your TMS.” It’s three more practical questions:

1. Could a tokenised‑deposit model like Whale reduce your reliance on cut‑off times and trapped cash, especially across Asia and Europe?
2. Should you be pushing your own banks harder for Falcon‑style AI forecasting built on your data, rather than generic black‑box risk scores?
3. If wholesale settlement tokens like Bettr gain regulatory traction under MiCA‑style regimes, do you want to be an early adopter, a fast follower, or a laggard?

Ant International has made its bet: blockchain for the rail, AI for the brain, tokenised bank money for the value. The rest of the treasury world now has to decide how much of that playbook it intends to copy.