Barclays Bank is to use Ant International's proprietary Time-Series Transformer (TST) AI FX Model, to help businesses reduce FX-related costs and risks against global volatilities.
Ant International’s TST Model is a transformer architecture-based big data model with close to 2 billion parameters. By integrating the latest time series forecasting algorithms, the TST big data model predicts patterns over time. Ant has also created new pre-training and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) frameworks to train the model and improve its predictions over time.
At the initial stage of the collaboration, Ant International has successfully completed the first batch of its intra-group FX transactions with Barclays.
The TST Model now forecasts the company's cashflow and FX exposure on an hourly, daily and weekly basis, with 90%+ accuracy. This means that Barclays can safely reduce its hedging costs, while Ant can channel the cost savings into providing more competitive rates for business customers.
Barclays has integrated the TST Model into its FX hedging platform, BARX NetFX, which broadly serves the e-commerce and payment industries.
“Ant International has been a valued and long-standing partner of Barclays, and we were thrilled to work together on this innovative solution,” says Ben Parkinson, head of Global Fintech & FX Automation Sales at Barclays. “Their state-of-the-art AI model has improved the accuracy of forecasting cash flows and helped us optimise the FX hedging process. By combining Ant International’s advanced AI forecasting capabilities with our market-leading FX expertise, we’ve been able to reduce uncertainty and cost, setting a new benchmark for FX risk management.”
While the use case currently supports major currency pairings used by Ant International, both companies aim to enhance the product to cover more currencies and serve more business needs.
Pushkaraj Gumaste, head of Corporate Banking, Asia Pacific & Middle East, Barclays, comments: “This collaboration is a strong testament to how Barclays is dedicated to evolving alongside our partners, by harnessing our complementary strengths to enhance our offerings and deliver more impactful solutions.”