Ant International Strengthens the "Air Silk Road"

Author | Chai Xuchen

Editor | Zhang Xiaoling

Against the backdrop of increasingly diversified international trade and robust recovery in global tourism, China's civil aviation industry is ushering in a new wave of expansive "going global".

With the continuous expansion of China’s visa-free “circle of friends”, domestic airlines’ route networks are no longer limited to traditional hub cities, but now penetrate the capillaries of global destinations. However, for Chinese airlines, implementing an internationalization strategy is far more complex than merely opening air routes; it is a profound reconstruction of commercial infrastructure.

Faced with unfamiliar overseas business environments, how to establish efficient, secure, and compliant financial arteries in more than a hundred countries and regions worldwide has become the key for airlines to succeed in overseas markets.

Against this background, recently, more than a dozen major airlines—including Air China, China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines, Hainan Airlines, and Hong Kong Airlines—have coincidentally chosen to form in-depth partnerships with Antom, the merchant payment and digital service platform under Ant International.

This cross-industry collaboration reflects the urgent demands of Chinese enterprises, amid new trends in international trade, to improve cross-border payment efficiency, refine fund management, strengthen risk control, and enhance overall operational effectiveness.

For a long time, cross-border payments have remained an invisible bottleneck hindering airlines’ business expansion.

Unlike the highly unified and convenient domestic mobile payment environment, the global payment market is extremely fragmented. In Southeast Asia, various local e-wallets flourish; in Europe, credit cards and local bank transfers coexist; and in Latin America and other regions, cash voucher payments still occupy a significant share of the market.

In traditional business models, airlines aiming for comprehensive global market coverage often have to interface separately with dozens or even hundreds of local payment service providers. This “siloed” construction pattern not only drives up technical coordination costs and exponentially increases system integration complexity, but also turns subsequent system maintenance and upgrades into a prolonged, labor-intensive battle.

Additionally, due to inconsistent technical standards among service providers, payment success rates fluctuate, fraud risks are hard to control, and fund repatriation cycles are long, all of which directly impact the airline’s revenue conversion and cash flow health.

The emergence of Antom offers a standardized “breakthrough” solution to these industry pain points. It helps airlines break through traditional barriers; with a single standardized technical connection, they can reach more than 300 global payment methods. For airlines, this means a dramatic “lightening” of their systems.

Hundreds of API interfaces that originally required massive IT teams to maintain have now been simplified into one unified Antom interface—significantly reducing system integration complexity and maintenance costs, while providing travelers with a seamless ticketing experience, effectively improving ticket purchase conversion rates.

After solving basic connectivity issues, Antom further leverages cutting-edge AI technologies to address the trade-off between payment efficiency and security risk management. In cross-border payment scenarios, due to cross-national network fluctuations and varying banking risk control rules, transaction failure rates are far higher than domestic payments. To address this, Antom has introduced AI intelligent routing technology to reduce order loss caused by technical issues.

Beyond reducing cost and improving efficiency in payments, the digital and intelligent upgrade of fund management is also a highlight of the cooperation. Airlines’ payment sources span multiple direct sale and agent distribution networks, with settlement, reconciliation, and refund procedures extremely complex. With Antom’s corporate account services, airlines can unify B2C direct sales payments and agent distribution channels.

The more critical breakthrough lies in fund dispatch and foreign exchange risk management. Leveraging Ant International’s depth in foreign exchange management and blockchain AI technology, Antom enables real-time fund transfers across banks and financial networks. This refined foreign exchange risk management capability, amplified by massive transaction volumes, can save airlines substantial exchange costs and directly boost enterprise profits.

In the digital era, the payment page is no longer merely the endpoint of a transaction, but is being redefined as the starting point of user interaction.

Antom focuses not only on “reducing costs” but also on “increasing revenue”. Its AI-driven marketing growth engine, A+Rewards, has successfully connected 11 mainstream e-wallets in Asia. With strict user privacy protection, this engine enables airlines to carry out precise marketing in local markets, transforming the massive traffic at the payment point into real customer retention.

Liu Zheng, CEO of Antom and Senior Vice President of Ant International, commented that the airline and travel industry is among the most globalized and cross-border transactional sectors.

He emphasized that Antom will continue to leverage Ant International’s various services to comprehensively strengthen customer payment, treasury management, and risk control capabilities, helping more Chinese enterprises build more resilient operating systems in the international market. His remarks not only highlight the strategic significance of the partnership, but also reveal that Chinese companies going global are shifting from a single product export model to one of capability export and management upgrading.

It’s worth noting that Antom's global digital commercial infrastructure already goes far beyond the aviation industry. At present, Antom’s merchant payment and digital services widely cover e-commerce, digital entertainment, food and beverage, travel, AI applications, and many other sectors, supporting the global expansion of multiple Chinese and international brands.

In the future, as more Chinese enterprises step onto the world stage, such integrated intelligent solutions—combining payment, risk control, treasury management, and marketing growth—may become the cornerstone for Chinese companies to build global competitiveness.

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