Capital A, an investment holding company, has partnered with Ant International to optimize treasury operations and enhance customer experience for its airline business, AirAsia. By integrating Ant International’s proprietary Falcon Time-Series Transformer (TST) Model, Capital A has improved AirAsia’s cash flow management across multiple currencies, enabling the airline to offer more stable and competitive pricing to its customers. This collaboration has led to enhanced foreign exchange (FX) risk management and a reduction in hedging costs by up to 40%, with these savings being passed on to customers through more competitive FX rates. The integration has also established a scalable treasury management solution for AirAsia, achieving 90% accuracy in forecasting the company’s cash flow and FX exposure on an hourly, daily, and weekly basis.
This initiative marks the first industry-tailored solution developed by Ant International from its Falcon model. Launched in April, Falcon has been adapted for various treasury management scenarios to create specialized industry solutions, including for airlines. The model was trained using 2 billion parameters, with 80 million parameters specifically derived from travel-related data, such as open-sourced information from online travel agencies (OTAs) and air carriers. This extensive training facilitated the development of an AI FX offering specifically designed for the airline industry, which was then integrated with Capital A’s corporate banking partner’s fixed FX rate infrastructure to process transactions for AirAsia. Ant International projects that this enhanced solution could eventually help the broader airline industry decrease overall FX costs by as much as 60% for certain currency pairs.
Aireen Omar, Group Chief Executive Officer of BigPay, Capital A’s fintech arm, commented on the partnership: “As a group, we serve over 70 million travelers yearly, 35 million AirAsia Rewards members, and our fintech arm, BigPay, has over 1.6 million carded users. Through our partnership with Ant International, we are able to reduce the hedging cost by 40%. This helps us immensely as Capital A processes massive multicurrency volumes every day, and this platform updates FX rates twice daily and provides great margin management capability.”
Kelvin Li, General Manager of Platform Tech at Ant International, added: “Our partnership with Capital A marks the first commercial deployment of Falcon, an important milestone in our journey to transform treasury and FX management for businesses. The results demonstrate how innovation, technology, and institutional-grade execution solve real-world FX challenges and reshape cross-border payments. We look forward to serving more businesses and industries as we continue to build on our enterprise embedded finance solutions.”
According to a report by McKinsey, the airline industry processes approximately 2.9 billion payment transactions annually, totaling $1 trillion. Despite this significant volume, the sector often lacks tailored payment solutions that enable airlines to reduce associated costs. Airlines spend more than $20 billion annually on payment-related expenses, which accounts for 3% of the industry’s total revenue. With the International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimating that airline travel will grow to 5.2 billion passengers this year, Capital A and Ant International recognize the critical need for enhanced solutions that leverage AI to improve FX risk management and lower costs within the industry.
Both Capital A and Ant International plan to continue exploring more efficient and transparent global fund management solutions through Ant International’s Bettr Treasury Platform.
