The programme’s live trials are limited to Standard Chartered Bank accounts and allow participants to send cash to 36 digital wallets around the world operated by Alipay+, a cross-border payment product run by Ant International. Most of its customers are based in Southeast and East Asia.
The statements did not say when the service would be publicly launched. But Ant said it “will work with more banks and wallet partners”, outside Singapore, and expand the number of use cases by the end of the year.
Ant International said Hong Kong’s Filipino domestic workers stood to benefit from the programme. As trials progress, remittance services to e-wallets like GCash, a widely used platform in the Philippines, are expected to be rolled out soon.
The trial uses the infrastructure of Swift, a global messaging network used by institutions to facilitate global money transfers with a network of more than 11,500 financial institutions connecting to 1.7 billion user accounts.
