DeepSeek’s Ant International, the overseas spin-off of Chinese fintech Ant Group, has connected more than 150 million merchants with over 2 billion consumer accounts around the world, as it positions its payments network as core infrastructure for the emerging AI commerce economy. The figures, disclosed at the company’s MoMents 2026 forum in Kuala Lumpur, underscore the scale Ant is seeking to leverage amid the rising adoption of artificial intelligence agents.
Ant International said its network supported more than 300 payment methods across 220 markets and processes over 20 million transactions a day on average, and it was seeking to broaden its market reach in Asia, Latin America and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “New models of financial interoperability and AI commerce give us powerful tools to help global companies as well as mom-and-pop shops to increase resilience and expand revenue streams,” Ant International CEO Peng Yang said in a news release.
At the event, the company unveiled its open-sourced Agentic Mobile Protocol, which is designed to enable AI agents to connect securely with digital wallets, banking apps and other mobile interfaces. The framework aims to move beyond traditional card-based systems towards a mobile- and AI-native payments layer. Ant Group rolled out a business-facing AI payment processing product through Alipay, allowing merchants – including small operators and “one-person companies” – to receive payments automatically when AI agents purchase their services. The tool is designed to support pay-per-use models and reduce the need for merchants to build their own payments infrastructure. In September, Alipay launched its consumer-facing AI Pay product, enabling transactions through AI-driven interfaces such as Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen app, Luckin Coffee’s virtual assistant and smart glasses from brands like Rokid. The company said the service surpassed 100 million users in February and processed more than 120 million transactions in one week that month.
The initiatives reflect a broader push to capture the transaction layer of AI commerce, as competition intensifies among technology and payments players, including OpenAI, Stripe and Google, as well as card networks Visa and Mastercard, the South China Morning Post reports.
