Ant International, a global digital payment and financial technology provider, has enabled financial institutions and fintech companies to extend credit access to over 15 million customers, including micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in emerging markets. The company is now expanding its Ant Credit Engine solution into Brazil through a strategic partnership with Dock.
Millions of MSMEs and individuals globally lack access to credit due to factors such as insufficient collateral, unstable income, or limited credit history. To address these underserved segments, financial service providers require intelligent credit technology solutions that leverage alternative data and can be integrated into existing systems. The Ant Credit Engine, a core offering from Ant International, is an intelligent and automated platform designed to assist financial institutions, fintechs, e-wallets, and digital platforms in sectors like e-commerce, delivery, and ride-hailing in making credit decisions with increased efficiency, accuracy, and speed.
Quan Yu, General Manager of Credit Services at Ant International, stated at FEBRABAN TECH 2025, a financial innovation event in Latin America, that “Financial inclusion shouldn’t mean lowering the bar for risk; it means raising the standard for intelligent decision-making. Just like canoeing in the Amazon River, navigating financial complexity requires the right tools.” Yu added that the embedded, alternative-data-driven approach facilitates seamless integration, smart decisioning, and rapid deployment, allowing partners to embed credit services directly into their platforms. This approach aims to enable lenders to reach customers, particularly MSMEs, where and when needed, and in an affordable manner, fostering more inclusive and sustainable growth.
The Ant Credit Engine streamlines the configuration and deployment of credit policies, reducing the process from weeks to minutes. Its code-free environment features a drag-and-drop interface for building and adjusting strategies, supported by rapid strategy testing and real-time risk alerts. The platform also offers a comprehensive template library for essential strategies, including underwriting, powered by decision rules, alternative data modeling, and advanced algorithms developed from Ant International’s industry expertise. By applying alternative data modeling, including heterogeneous networks and deep neural networks, lenders can transform fragmented data into actionable insights for more precise and efficient borrower eligibility assessments.
Further enhancing the credit engine is an AI-driven strategy bot, which generates tailored credit policies rapidly. Lenders can define and prioritize business objectives and constraints, such as increasing eligibility, reducing portfolio risk, and detecting fraud. The strategy bot then automatically balances these factors to generate optimal, customized strategies by analyzing and comparing a range of strategy sets.
In Brazil, Dock, a payments and banking technology provider, will integrate the Ant Credit Engine into its Dock One platform, a composable and unified platform for scaling financial services. The Ant Credit Engine will become available within Dock’s ecosystem, which connects over 400 banks and fintechs across Latin America. This collaboration seeks to help these institutions expand credit access to underserved communities while improving operational efficiency and reducing costs.
