Ant International plans to be the first to apply for a stablecoin issuance license in Hong Kong, with a business scale potentially exceeding 150 billion USD.

On June 12, according to Bloomberg, Ant International will submit an application for a stablecoin issuance license to the Hong Kong Monetary Authority as soon as possible after the Stablecoin Ordinance takes effect in August, and the license will be applied to cross-border payments and global treasury management business. At the same time, according to the Hong Kong Economic Daily, Ant International responded that it welcomes the passage of the “Stablecoin Bill” by the Hong Kong Legislative Council, and the company will submit an application after the bill takes effect on August 1 and the relevant channels are opened, hoping to contribute more to Hong Kong’s construction of a future international financial center. Ant International is accelerating its investments and expanding partnerships in global asset management, bringing its AI, blockchain and stablecoin innovations to real-world large-scale applications.

Stablecoins are special regulated crypto assets pegged to fiat currencies, which are highly transparent, can reduce costs and improve efficiency for cross-border finance, and have developed rapidly in recent years. IN RECENT YEARS, HONG KONG HAS BEEN ACTIVELY DEVELOPING A WEB 3.0 FINANCIAL CENTER, WITH HKD-PEGGED STABLECOINS AS AN IMPORTANT PART OF ITS FUTURE FINANCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE. At the end of May, the Legislative Council passed Hong Kong’s Stablecoin Bill, which regulates the issuance of stablecoins pegged to the Hong Kong dollar and other fiat currencies, aiming to improve the regulatory framework for virtual asset activities in Hong Kong to maintain financial stability and promote financial innovation.

(Ant International became the first to join the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s “Ensemble” liquidity management sandbox project in 2024, with its Whale platform achieving multiple breakthroughs in collaboration with partners in October of that year.)

Currently, major competitors of Ant International include Stripe and Paypal from the United States, as well as card organizations Visa and MasterCard, all of which have actively engaged in the U.S. stablecoin issuance system. Ant International is the first global fintech company to explicitly state that it will take the lead in submitting an application for a stablecoin issuance license to the Hong Kong government and has extensive experience in large-scale fund management.

Ant International has managed over 300 billion USD in funds globally using Blockchain.

As the parent company of Alipay, Ant Group takes internationalization as its core development strategy, and focuses on serving enterprises and institutions in cross-border financial business overseas, opening up cross-border payment cooperation platforms. In 2024, Ant Group will be reorganized, and Ant International will begin to “stand on its own”, forming a cross-border wallet payment and digital solution (Alipay+), cross-border corporate account service (WorldFirst), Four core business segments, including global merchant payment service (Antom) and scenario financial service (EmFi). Bloomberg reported earlier that Ant International’s revenue in 2024 exceeded $3 billion, and it has been profitable for two consecutive years, and has plans to consider listing in Hong Kong.

According to reports, Ant International’s global treasury technology services department manages its own and client capital flows in more than 100 currencies in its four core businesses, offline digital payments covering more than 70 markets around the world, online e-commerce payments in more than 100 currencies, global account operations for 1.2 million global small and medium-sized enterprises, and treasury flow management between millions of enterprises and banks in various countries, involving own and customer capital flows in more than 100 currencies.

In competition with international giants, Ant International has developed two core fund management technology products: Whale, a blockchain real-time cross-border funding platform, and Falcon, an AI foreign exchange model. According to Bloomberg, Ant International’s annual fund processing volume in 2024 will exceed $1 trillion, and Ant has previously revealed that more than one-third of the fund processing volume in 2024 will be processed through the Whale platform using blockchain technology. According to this estimate, in 2024, there will be more than $300 billion of global funds managed by Ant International’s blockchain technology. If half of them can be implemented in stablecoin applications, that is, the scale of stablecoin trading volume in its own stock business, it can reach more than $150 billion.

Deeply participate in the government sandbox program, with Hong Kong as an important anchor point for going overseas.

It is reported that Ant International also plans to apply for licenses related to the issuance of stablecoins from local regulatory authorities in Luxembourg and Singapore, but Hong Kong remains a key focus of Ant International’s global layout. At the 2024 Hong Kong FinTech Week, Zhang Xianzhong, Chairman of Ant Group and Ant International, stated, “I hope Ant can contribute to establishing Hong Kong as a global leader in tokenization and Web3 fintech center.”

As early as May 2023, Ant Group became one of the first batch of participants to support the HKMA’s “e-HKD” pilot scheme, with the Hong Kong version of Alipay, AlipayHK, participating in the pilot.

In 2024, the Whale platform participated in the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s “Ensemble Project” liquidity management sandbox and achieved two breakthroughs in October: completing the first cross-bank Hong Kong dollar blockchain test transaction with HSBC, enabling real-time cross-bank transfers around the clock, improving efficiency and reducing operational costs; and successfully realizing Hong Kong dollar-denominated internal transactions with Standard Chartered Bank for the first time, applying it in a real commercial environment and between banking systems. In May 2025, Ant International partnered with HSBC again to launch Hong Kong’s first blockchain settlement solution, the “Tokenized Deposit Service,” allowing customers to make real-time payments in Hong Kong dollars and US dollars using their corporate wallets.

Ant International diversifies its layout in major global markets and is also an early participant in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s related financial innovation sandbox pilot. In November 2023, Ant International participated in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Guardian, exploring the construction of an open and interoperable digital asset trading platform and liquidity tools based on Blockchain.

Apart from local banks in Hong Kong such as HSBC and Standard Chartered, Ant International has also collaborated with globally and regionally systemically important banks since 2023, including Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, OCBC, DBS Bank, and BNP Paribas. In this regard, Li Yue, General Manager of Technology at the Ant International platform, clearly positions its business as “building a technological bridge for the financial services industry.” The extensive collaboration with large institutions also demonstrates the industry’s recognition of its technological security, reliability, and compliance.

“Hong Kong’s status as an international financial center is not merely due to the numerous bank façades in Central; fundamentally, it is because the global industries recognize Hong Kong’s treasury management as flexible and efficient, with low transaction costs suitable for the actual trading needs of various industries, supported by a highly secure and multi-layered ecosystem of traditional financial institutions such as banks.” Xiaogeng, a member of the Chief Executive’s Policy Unit of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and Chairman of the Hong Kong International Financial Association, pointed out that by developing stablecoin platforms through technology and ecological growth, and encouraging diverse large-scale applications in real scenarios, it can promote multinational companies to choose Hong Kong as their treasury management center, which is particularly significant for consolidating and enhancing Hong Kong’s status as an international financial center.