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Ant International

Institution · Custodian / tech

Ant International is the Singapore-headquartered international payments and treasury arm of Ant Group, and the operator of the Whale blockchain treasury platform, the substrate for a multi-bank tokenised-deposit rollout that has moved from a pilot with DBS (August 2024) to production with HSBC (May 2025), on-chain FX settlement with Kinexys (August 2025), and production with Standard Chartered (December 2025) (the Standard Chartered leg is covered as a separate theme). Ant International runs 2 distinct tokenisation programmes in parallel: Whale intragroup treasury, integrated with 4 separate banks, and a consumer/merchant-payments line with StraitsX and Grab that settles Alipay+ cross-border merchant transactions in Singapore dollars. The company has positioned itself as a technology platform operator that bank counterparties deploy tokenised-deposit and tokenised-cash products onto, rather than as a stablecoin issuer or licensed bank in its own right. For an APAC tokenisation operator, Ant International is the most consequential non-bank tokenisation platform operator with native multi-currency APAC capability, and the institutional partner that GSIBs are choosing as the launch substrate for production tokenised-deposit work in the region.

Tokenisation positioning

Ant International is structurally distinctive among tokenisation platforms because the operator is itself a heavy user of the platform's primary use case (cross-border, multi-currency, multi-entity treasury). Ant Group operates extensive cross-border payment and treasury flows across APAC, and the Whale platform's design priorities reflect what a corporate treasury operator (rather than a bank) needs out of a tokenised-deposit substrate. The thesis has held up sufficiently in market that 4 separate banks (DBS, HSBC, Standard Chartered, and Kinexys/J.P. Morgan) have integrated with Whale rather than each building a proprietary equivalent.

The platform proposition is multi-currency, multi-bank, near-real-time, 24/7 movement of tokenised-deposit balances. The currencies live as of late 2025 include HKD, CNH, USD, and SGD on the Standard Chartered launch (Ledger Insights, 18 Dec 2025). Trade-press coverage has separately framed the platform's broader integration claim as connection with at least 10 major banks' tokenised-deposit solutions; 4 of those bank integrations (DBS, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Kinexys) are named in primary sources below, and the remainder of the roster is not corroborated by a published list.

Named partnerships and pilots

Whale treasury platform: bank integrations

Latest first.

  • Standard Chartered tokenised-deposit production launch (live, December 2025). Multi-currency (HKD, CNH, USD, SGD) tokenised deposits for Ant International's own accounts, 24/7 movement between worldwide intragroup entities, moved from pilot to commercial production in December 2025; both firms sit in HKMA's Project Ensemble (Ledger Insights, 18 Dec 2025). The first GSIB production tokenised-deposit deployment on the Whale platform. See Standard Chartered + Ant Whale tokenised deposit.
  • Kinexys USD-EUR FX settlement (live, August 2025). Kinexys Digital Payments settled one of the first near-instant USD-to-EUR on-chain FX cross-border payments in Asia, integrated into Ant International's Whale treasury platform; J.P. Morgan had already processed billions of US dollars for Ant International on Kinexys the prior year (J.P. Morgan newsroom).
  • HSBC Tokenised Deposit Service (live, May 2025). HSBC launched Hong Kong's first bank-led blockchain settlement service for corporate cash management, with Ant International as the inaugural user digitising USD deposits into tokens on HSBC's ledger; the service later extended to SGD, GBP, and EUR across Singapore, the UK, and Luxembourg, and supports HKMA Project Ensemble use cases (HSBC newsroom).
  • DBS Treasury Tokens pilot (pilot, August 2024). DBS piloted Treasury Tokens with Ant International on DBS's EVM-compatible permissioned blockchain, wired into its core payments engine and into Ant International's Whale platform, targeting atomic, programmable 24/7 liquidity management for intragroup treasury flows (DBS newsroom).

Alipay+ merchant payments (StraitsX, Grab)

A separate product line from Whale: consumer and merchant cross-border payments rather than intragroup treasury.

  • Alipay+ / GrabPay cross-border merchant settlement (live, October 2024). Ant International's Alipay+ wallet users scan existing GrabPay QR codes at over 100,000 Singapore merchants; StraitsX clears and settles on Avalanche using its XSGD stablecoin and Purpose Bound Money (PBM), giving merchants immediate Singapore-dollar settlement. Transaction volume across the wider network grew 174% year on year across 22 payment apps in 14 countries (StraitsX, as of 2025) (StraitsX case study).
  • Purpose Bound Money origination (announced November 2023). The originating collaboration between StraitsX, Ant International, and Grab behind the later Alipay+/GrabPay rollout above: GrabPay merchants accept Alipay+ payments with XSGD real-time settlement and PBM smart contracts enforcing conditional, whitelisted use, announced November 2023 ahead of the 2024 Singapore launch (StraitsX).

Industry and standards work

  • Project Guardian (MAS-led) tokenised-bank-liabilities FX work. Ant International co-led the ISDA + Ant International industry report on FX with tokenised bank liabilities, 3 July 2025, with contributors including BNY, HSBC, OCBC, GFXD. The report quantified a USD 50bn cross-border cost saving by 2030 if interoperability standardised, and is the analytical predecessor to the bank-integration wave above.
  • Ant Group affiliations. Ant International is part of the Ant Group structure, which also includes Alipay and Ant's mainland China consumer-payments franchise. Whale is operated by Ant International as the international corporate-treasury arm, operationally and legally separate from the mainland China consumer-payments operations under the PBoC perimeter.

Regulatory perimeter

Ant International operates as a non-bank technology platform operator, with the regulated wrappers carried by the bank counterparties that issue tokenised-deposit liabilities onto the Whale platform. The Standard Chartered launch operates under Standard Chartered's own banking licences in Hong Kong and Singapore, with the tokenised-deposit liability sitting on Standard Chartered's balance sheet rather than on Ant International's. This differs fundamentally from a stablecoin issuer model where the platform operator is the regulated entity holding reserves.

What is undisclosed in current public coverage is whether Whale's operation requires Ant International to hold a specific regulated wrapper in each jurisdiction the platform operates in (a payments licence, an MAS Major Payment Institution status, an HKMA stored-value-facility licence, or any other), or whether Ant operates entirely under the issuing-bank's licensing perimeter for each currency leg. The two models have very different supervisory implications for how Whale could expand its bank-counterparty set.

The Singapore DTSP regime under the FSM Act extends MAS reach to Singapore-incorporated digital-token-service providers serving non-Singapore customers. Whether the DTSP perimeter is engaged for Ant International's Whale operation, given the platform's cross-border scope and the Singapore headquarters, is a question current public coverage does not address.

Why it matters

Ant International's importance rests on a few distinct factors. Ant International is the first non-bank technology operator to sit at the centre of a GSIB production tokenised-deposit launch in APAC, and the Whale + Standard Chartered architecture is notably different from the bank-built tokenisation rails that have anchored Western GSIB programmes (Kinexys for JPMorgan, the Citi Token Services rail for Citi, Wells Fargo Digital Cash). That a regional GSIB chose to deploy onto a non-bank platform rather than build a proprietary equivalent is a meaningful institutional-adoption signal for the platform model.

The multi-currency APAC capability on a single platform is also distinctive: the HKD + CNH + USD + SGD coverage of the Standard Chartered launch is the closest thing to a full APAC trade-corridor stack on a single rail. Kinexys runs USD, EUR, GBP. Partior runs USD, EUR, SGD. The Japanese tokenised-deposit consortium platforms run JPY. Whale's APAC-currency depth is a meaningful differentiator that directly addresses the cross-border-corridor-fragmentation problem.

The Ant Group lineage also gives Ant International credibility as a corporate treasury operator that other Asian corporates can plug into. The Whale platform is positioned for B2B corporate treasury workflows, with Ant International itself as the launch corporate user. The cross-border treasury and intragroup liquidity-management use case is a large addressable market that conventional stablecoin issuers and bank-built tokenised-deposit rails have not historically prioritised.

Recent activity

  • 18 December 2025Standard Chartered tokenised-deposit production launch on Whale. 4 currencies live (HKD, CNH, USD, SGD), 24/7 movement, intragroup treasury initial use case (Ledger Insights).
  • August 2025Kinexys Digital Payments settled one of the first near-instant USD-to-EUR on-chain FX cross-border payments in Asia for Ant International, integrated into the Whale platform (J.P. Morgan newsroom).
  • 3 July 2025ISDA + Ant International report on FX with tokenised bank liabilities under Project Guardian. Quantified USD 50bn cross-border cost saving by 2030 if interoperability standardises (ISDA).
  • May 2025HSBC launched its Tokenised Deposit Service in Hong Kong with Ant International as the inaugural user, digitising USD corporate deposits into tokens on HSBC's ledger (HSBC newsroom).
  • October 2024Alipay+ / GrabPay cross-border merchant settlement went live in Singapore, with StraitsX clearing and settling in XSGD on Avalanche using Purpose Bound Money (StraitsX case study).
  • August 2024DBS piloted Treasury Tokens with Ant International on DBS's EVM-compatible permissioned blockchain, integrated with the Whale platform for 24/7 liquidity management (DBS newsroom).
  • November 2023StraitsX, Ant International, and Grab announced the Purpose Bound Money collaboration for conditional cross-border merchant payments, the origin of the later Alipay+/GrabPay rollout (StraitsX).

Open questions

  • The full bank-counterparty list integrated with Whale tokenised-deposit infrastructure beyond the 4 named integrations (DBS, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Kinexys). The "at least 10 major banks" framing in trade-press coverage is not corroborated by a published roster.
  • The specific ledger technology and architectural model. Whether Whale is a shared substrate with multiple banks' tokenised-deposit liabilities co-existing, or a coordination layer brokering between separately-operated bank rails, is undisclosed.
  • The regulatory wrapper Ant International holds (or does not hold) for the platform operation in each operating jurisdiction. Whether the operation is licensed-bank-counterparty-only or whether Ant holds an independent payments or DTSP licence anywhere is undisclosed.
  • The interaction with HKMA EnsembleTX. Standard Chartered is a named EnsembleTX participant; whether the Standard Chartered HKD tokenised-deposit issuance on Whale settles its interbank cash leg through EnsembleTX or sits parallel to it is undisclosed.
  • The CNH-leg supervisory architecture. Tokenising offshore CNH on a non-bank platform operated by an Ant Group subsidiary touches PBoC-adjacent perimeters that are not addressed in current public coverage.
  • Ant International's position on AI-agent-controlled corporate treasury workflows. The platform is positioned for corporate treasury use; whether agent-driven treasury orchestration is explicitly accommodated is undisclosed.
  • The relationship between Ant International (Singapore-headquartered, international arm) and Ant Group (mainland China parent, Alipay franchise) on tokenisation strategy. Whether the 2 entities coordinate on tokenisation work, or whether Whale is operationally and strategically separate, is not consistently stated in public coverage.