Ant International upgrades Alipay+ with privacy tech

Ant International has completed a privacy technology upgrade to its Alipay+ global wallet gateway. The system now uses privacy-enhancing technologies across all critical operations.

According to Ant International, Alipay+ connects 1.8 billion consumer accounts and 150 million merchants. It says the deployment makes Alipay+ the first digital payment system to apply this technology at scale across a live global wallet gateway.

Under the upgrade, data handled by Alipay+ is encrypted before processing and remains unidentifiable to Ant International during the payment process. The company says this is designed to help mobile payment partners manage cross-border transactions while meeting data privacy and data sovereignty requirements.

The approach reduces the transmission of sensitive information because only encrypted data is sent to Alipay+ for processing. Partners can also use the technology without changing the current user experience or their existing operating requirements.

"Trust in our systems is integral to our ability to deliver secure and efficient digital services to users globally," said Jiang-Ming Yang, chief innovation officer at Ant International.

"This upgrade enables us to safeguard and strengthen that trust by giving partners and customers assurance that their data remains private throughout the payment lifecycle - even from us," Yang said.

Regulatory guidance

The deployment comes alongside regulatory work in Singapore on the use of privacy-enhancing technologies. Ant International worked with the Personal Data Protection Commission on a proof of concept covering AI prediction model training and use with an e-wallet partner.

In that test, Ant International says it worked with a partner to improve customer engagement programmes by jointly training an AI model on shared customer relationships without transferring or sharing the original customer data.

The Personal Data Protection Commission has issued Practical Guidance on how data should be classified and handled in that scenario under Singapore's current regulations. Ant International says the guidance gives partners greater clarity on how the technology can fit within existing compliance frameworks.

The guidance also addressed the use of multi-party computation in model training. According to the assessment cited by Ant International, secret shares, on their own, would not constitute personal data for the receiving parties, although organisations remain responsible for ensuring that each deployment is robust and provides reasonable assurance of data protection.

Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority also referenced the work through its privacy technology sandbox initiative.

"We are pleased that Ant International's participation in IMDA's PET Sandbox has resulted in the deployment of PETs in Alipay+, a global digital payment solution for many. This is a significant milestone that demonstrates Ant International's commitment in prioritising trust with their partners and customers. PETs can be valuable tools to unlock new data opportunities, without compromising sensitive information, and we encourage more companies to join IMDA's Sandbox to pilot the use of PETs," said Ms Denise Wong, Assistant Chief Executive of Data Innovation and Protection, IMDA, and Commissioner of PDPC.

Partner rollout

Ant International invites Alipay+ e-wallet partners to incorporate the same privacy technologies into their operations. It also plans to release the underlying codebase in phases, allowing partners to review how the system is implemented and retain oversight of their deployments.

That is significant for a network built around cross-border transactions, where payment providers often operate across multiple regulatory regimes. Ant International presents the upgrade as a way to maintain service continuity amid increasing scrutiny of data handling and localisation rules in several markets.

Research ties

Ant International is also extending its work on trust technologies through a research collaboration with Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Under a master research collaboration agreement with the university's Digital Trust Centre, the two sides are developing tools intended to strengthen trust in digital payments.

According to Ant International, the programme's first year concluded with work on trusted AI and secure digital infrastructure. The next phase will continue research into the use and deployment of privacy-enhancing technologies in cross-border payments.

The latest rollout gives Ant International a live commercial use case for technology that regulators and payment providers are increasingly examining as they seek ways to analyse data and derive value from it without exposing the underlying personal information.