AT STELLAR Coffee in Kuala Lumpur’s historic Rex building, founder Cheyenne Si serves Johor-grown Liberica beans. About seven in 10 of her customers are tourists. Before her shop joined Malaysia’s DuitNow QR network in late 2023, customers would fumble at the counter with currencies she couldn’t easily accept, and cash piled up. Today, more than 90 percent of her transactions are cashless, paid through visitors’ home e-wallets. That shift, multiplied across more than 360,000 Malaysian micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) accepting cross-border mobile payments, is the story Ant International wants to tell about itself.
The company’s 2025 Sustainability Report, released May 12, 2026, argues that AI in financial services should reach the smallest businesses in emerging markets. Whether the report delivers depends on which page you’re reading.
This is the first year the company has tied sustainability metrics to management evaluations. Chairman Eric Jing put it plainly in his opening letter: “Accountability must be structural, not aspirational. When sustainability outcomes are valued as much as revenue growth or operational efficiency, the whole organization is more likely to align accordingly — just like how it might work with entire economies.”
The open question is whether that changes executive behavior or simply improves the slide deck.
Some history matters here. In November 2020, Chinese regulators halted what would have been the world’s largest initial public offering, a $34.5-billion dual listing. The restructuring took years. It concluded in 2023 with a fine of nearly $1 billion covering violations involving corporate governance, financial consumer protection, payment and settlement, and anti-money laundering. Ant International began operating independently in 2024.
What ‘Small AI’ means on the ground
The report calls its approach the “Small AI” principle. The most useful AI for emerging markets fits inside the apps people already use, on the phones they already own. Hyperscale data centers are beside the point. The report ties this to the World Bank’s Digital Progress and Trends Report 2025, which it says highlighted “Small AI” as affordable, accessible and context-specific. The challenge behind that idea is familiar: The smallest businesses rarely have the capital or technical capacity to deploy the tools larger companies take for granted.
For a vendor like Cheyenne Si, the change is a working QR code at the counter. The artificial intelligence behind it stays out of view. EPOS360, which Ant International rolled out at the end of 2025, combines payments and business operations into a single device aimed at micro-merchants. Antom Copilot, an AI assistant for merchants, claims to improve efficiency by up to 46 percent by automating inventory adjustments and cash-flow tracking. According to the report, EPOS360 costs a fraction of a smartphone.
Then there is credit. Bettr, the company’s embedded credit service, says it reaches more than 30 million eligible users through partner platforms, double last year’s figure. In Vietnam, a partnership with VPBank has reduced loan approval times by about 80 percent. The report says most banks there still take six to eight weeks. The model uses alternative data, including transaction history and order volume, to assess creditworthiness without collateral.
The Filipino angle
Local merchants and wallet users will find much of this close to home. Ant Group is among the key shareholders in Mynt, GCash’s parent company, alongside Globe Telecom and Ayala Corp. The sustainability report describes GCash as a strategic partner without mentioning the ownership link.
Early adoption of the Alipay+ Super App Platform helped build the mini-apps that run inside GCash without requiring users to leave the main app. The report claims transaction conversions more than doubled, while homepage click-through rates increased by more than 60 percent.
Ant International and the International Finance Corp. are also developing a Sustainability Impact Scorecard for Filipino MSMEs with GCash following discussions at COP30, the United Nations climate conference in Belem, Brazil. The tool would allow small vendors to track their environmental and social footprint using a mobile phone without needing consultants to interpret global standards.
The privacy question
Bringing data-intensive financial technology into developing markets raises familiar questions. As a longtime tech observer and small-business operator, my concern is more basic: Users deserve to know where their information goes and who can access it.
The National Privacy Commission, to its credit, has been addressing the issue. Issued Dec. 19, 2024, NPC Advisory 2024-04 spells out how the Data Privacy Act applies to AI systems that process personal data. Enforcing those rules is the harder challenge.
The sustainability report does not detail how Filipino user data flows between GCash and Ant International systems. Cheyenne Si in Kuala Lumpur is not thinking about that when a tourist pays with a home e-wallet and the transaction settles seamlessly. But for a Manila sari-sari store owner opening that scorecard app for the first time, the question is simpler: Who has my data, and what are they doing with it?