Capital A has partnered with Ant International to use AI in managing cash flows, cutting costs and lowering AirAsia’s hedging expenses by up to 40% while offering customers more stable, competitive pricing.
Powered by Ant International’s Falcon Time-Series Transformer (TST) Model, the system forecasts cash flow and FX exposure with 90 percent accuracy on an hourly, daily and weekly basis, helping Capital A manage multicurrency operations more efficiently.
The partnership marks the first industry-specific solution built on Ant International’s Falcon platform, launched in April.
Trained on 2 billion parameters and 80 million travel-related data points from open sources such as online travel agencies and airlines, the model was designed to meet the FX needs of the aviation sector.
Integrated with Capital A’s corporate banking partner’s fixed FX rate infrastructure, the solution completes transactions for AirAsia.
Ant International estimates that, over time, similar systems could help airlines cut FX costs by as much as 60% for selected currency pairs.
According to McKinsey, airlines process about 2.9 billion payment transactions annually worth about US$1 trillion, yet spend over US$20 billion each year on payment-related costs, or around 3% of total industry revenue.
With air travel projected to reach 5.2 billion passengers this year as estimated by IATA, both companies plan to expand AI-driven FX and treasury management capabilities through Ant International’s Bettr Treasury Platform.
Aireen Omar, Group Chief Executive Officer, BigPay, said,
“As a group, we serve over 70 million travellers yearly, 35 million AirAsia Rewards members and our fintech arm, BigPay has over 1.6 million carded users. Through our partnership with Ant International, we are able to reduce the hedging cost by 40%.
This helps us immensely as Capital A processes massive multicurrency volumes every day and this platform updates FX rates twice daily and provides great margin management capability.”
Kelvin Li, General Manager of Platform Tech at Ant International, said,
“Our partnership with Capital A marks the first commercial deployment of Falcon, an important milestone in our journey to transform treasury and FX management for businesses.
The results demonstrate how innovation, technology and institutional-grade execution solve real-world FX challenges and reshape cross-border payments. We look forward to serving more businesses and industries as we continue to build on our enterprise embedded finance solutions.”
Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Malaysia, based on image by AirAsia
