Alipay Europe, a subsidiary of Ant International, is amongst the latest companies to receive approval as an electronic money token issuer. While this is the same type of authorization needed for EU stablecoins, Ant International does not intend to issue a retail coin.
Instead it is launching the Bettr settlement token, which is only intended for wholesale usage between Ant affiliates, as confirmed in a LinkedIn post by the company’s General Manager of Platforms, Kelvin Li.
Under the Ant International umbrella, the company provides services including the Alipay+ cross border payments solution, Antom merchant services and WorldFirst SME trade accounts. Many of these offerings drive the need to move money around the world.
To avoid delays with bank opening hours and enable 24/7 instant settlement where possible, the company has developed its Ant International Whale platform to handle corporate treasury. Ant International has been the first client for several tokenized deposit solutions and Whale is connected to at least ten banks. These include BNP Paribas, DBS, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan’s Kinexys Digital Payments, HSBC, OCBC and Standard Chartered. The key advantage of tokenized deposits is that they enable instant cross border money movement 24/7 and support programmability. Around a third of the company’s global payments use Whale. It is connected to so many banks that in a recent report Ant described how it could act as a liquidity provider between banks. So how does a Euro settlement token fit in with this?
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