Ant Builds a Mobile Payment Network as an Alternative to Visa, Mastercard
Five years after the Chinese government quashed Ant Group’s plans for what would have been the world’s largest initial public offering, the Chinese fintech giant has built a fast-growing international business. That offshoot runs a global payment network for digital wallets that could one day be a formidable alternative to Visa or Mastercard.
Ant International increased revenue between 20% and 25% in 2025 to an estimated $3.7 billion, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. That’s almost 10% of Ant Group’s overall revenue in 2025, the person added. In 2019, when Ant last disclosed its full-year financials, its international business had less than $1 billion in revenue, or around 5% of Ant’s total.
Investors are now hoping Ant could take the international arm public, allowing them to cash out some of their investments. Ant set the stage for an IPO of the overseas branch in 2024, when it restructured the unit’s ownership by putting it into a separate company owned by Ant Group, Alibaba Group, Ant International employees and some of the investors who had put money into Ant. U.S. investors in Ant include Silver Lake, Warburg Pincus, The Carlyle Group and General Atlantic.
Ant International’s valuation would likely be just in the tens of billions, given the price-to-revenue multiples at which other payment companies such as Visa and Mastercard are traded. That’s a fraction of Ant Group’s potential 2020 IPO valuation of $315 billion.
When asked about the possibility of an IPO, Douglas Feagin, president of Ant International, said: “We’re focused on driving our business, and we don’t have anything to share about that now.”
If Chinese regulators allowed Ant International to go public, that would also give a shot of confidence to international investors, who have turned cold on financing Chinese startups following the Chinese government’s crackdown on tech platforms, China’s sluggish economic growth and Beijing’s rising geopolitical tensions with the West in the past five years.
“Almost every major U.S. endowment fund has illiquid holdings on Ant that they couldn’t realize, and it’s been a big overhang for them to consider further investments in China,” said an executive with a U.S.-based endowment fund, which has significant exposure to Ant through several venture capital and private equity firms.
The core of Ant International is a mobile payment network, Alipay+, which connects more than 40 mobile payment apps from dozens of countries across Asia, Europe and the Middle East and is accepted by 150 million merchants in over 100 countries, mostly for money spent by tourists.
Ant International also has developed AI models to predict foreign exchange usage that big banks including Citigroup, Barclays and Standard Chartered are already using. Beyond these two divisions, the company provides online and offline payment processing services for merchants around the world, and foreign exchange services for small merchants.
Ant International’s mobile payments business is still small compared with the credit card giants. Ant International estimates that $1.4 trillion in funds moved through its platform in 2025, including anything from a South Korean tourist’s spending in Thailand to an Indonesian consumer’s e-commerce purchase for goods from China. By comparison, Visa processed $14.2 trillion in payments in the 12 months ending September.
“It’s still early stage. I think the potential of what this can do is enormous,” said Feagin, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who joined Ant in 2016.
Overseas Tentacles
Once controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Ant Group has long operated the Alipay app used by Chinese consumers. Alipay is one of the two dominant payment apps in China, the other being Tencent Holdings’ WeChat Pay. Alipay also lets users invest in mutual funds and other financial products, as well as take out short-term consumer loans, and it offers perks such as coupons.
Ant began spreading its tentacles overseas in the mid-2010s, when Ant and Alibaba invested in Indian mobile payment startup Paytm and started sending engineers to India to help the fledgling company build its technology. That approach expanded to around a dozen countries across Asia, where Ant invested as a significant minority shareholder in local mobile payment apps, then passed on its expertise to help scale up the business.
Those investments came in handy in 2020, when Ant launched Alipay+, which acts as a digital intermediary between points of sale and payment processors such as banks, for the use of digital wallets.
Most of the digital wallets Ant had invested in joined. So did two dozen others that had no financial relationship with Ant, including SoftBank Group subsidiary PayPay in Japan and OCBC, a leading bank in Singapore and Southeast Asia.
In Thailand, where only 10 million of the 70 million people have credit cards, Ant has invested in the country’s top digital payment app, TrueMoney. The Alipay+ network lets TrueMoney users spend money when traveling to destinations popular with Thai tourists, such as China, Japan and South Korea.
“We’re lucky to have Ant as our investor because they are not just investing in money. They also share technology and the practice of what worked well in the China market,” said Monsinee Nakapanant, co-president of Ascend Money, the parent company of TrueMoney. Nakapanant added that Ant also helped TrueMoney build the credit algorithms for its consumer lending program, which managed to keep the default rate at 1.8%, similar to those for consumer loans from banks in the country.
Alipay+ charges merchants a fee to process transactions through its network, then passes part of the fee to its wallet partners, similar to how Visa and Mastercard charge the individual banks that issue their name-bearing credit cards and the merchants using their payment rails. But unlike the Visa and Mastercard credit card networks, which are popular mostly in the developed world, the digital wallets Alipay+ connects are predominantly based on QR codes, a prevalent form of payment in Asia and parts of Europe and the Middle East.
These wallets typically have QR codes for spending and receiving funds, and depending on the services offered in their own countries, users can choose how to top up their funds, through offline cash deposit, debit cards or even sometimes credit cards.
QR-code based payments are popular in developing economies because they allow merchants there, especially mom-and-pop shops, to accept and process payments more cheaply than credit card payment systems. Alipay+ has added tap-and-pay features as an option for wallet users in South Korea, Philippines and Hong Kong, who can now tap and pay merchants accepting Mastercard worldwide.
In the U.S., Ant International is for the time being focused on working with local partners to ensure Asian tourists visiting America can use their digital wallets when buying things from U.S. merchants, according to Feagin. “We’re not going to serve domestic payment solutions in the U.S. If any of the wallets in the US want to utilize Alipay+, we’re open to that,” he said.
The company is also in early-stage discussions to connect with PayPal World, an international payment platform PayPal launched last year, according to two people with direct knowledge of that development. This platform integrates WeChat Pay, India’s Unified Payments Interface and Mercado Pago, popular in Latin America.