This week’s edition of Finovate Global looks at recent fintech news and developments from Singapore.

Ant International Raises $1.2 billion in Series A funding

Ant International, the Singapore-based business arm of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, has secured $1.2 billion in Series A funding. Existing supporters Ant Group and Alibaba Group Holding participated in the equity round along with a number of unnamed international institutional investors.

The capital will be used to accelerate Ant International’s global growth plans and fuel continued innovation in a number of areas including merchant payments, account management, and more inclusive financial services for businesses of all sizes. With its main operations in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, Ant International offers a partnership network of banks, card companies, mobile payment firms, and technology platforms that connects 150 million merchants around the world with more than two billion user accounts.

Spun off as an independent entity in 2024 and headquartered in Singapore, Ant International operates four main businesses: its digital consumer payments platform, Alipay+; its payment processing technology and infrastructure provider, Antom; its cross-border payments and foreign exchange service for businesses, WorldFirst; and its digital banking and financial services platform, Bettr. The company supports more than 300 payment methods in 220+ markets. This includes 50 mobile payment partners and 10+ national QR code systems.

Ant International’s funding news comes as the company announces new partnerships with Freedom Holding Corporation to streamline online shopping from China to customers in Kazakhstan via its Antom division and with QI Tech to expand credit access for e-commerce merchants and consumers in Brazil through its Bettr division.

Alipay+ partners with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Bank

Ant International’s payment gateway, Alipay+, has announced a number of new bank partners in recent weeks, adding to its network of more than 50 digital wallets, banks, and financial institutions. The latest firm to team up with Alipay+ is Hong Kong-based Hang Seng Bank. Alipay+’s first banking partner in Hong Kong, Hang Seng Bank will be able to offer users of its mobile app the ability to make payments via QR code scans. The payment option works both in the Chinese mainland as well as overseas at 100+ million merchants in more than 55 countries and regions.

“Customers increasingly expect seamless payment solutions when traveling overseas,” Hang Seng Bank Head of Retail Banking and Wealth Rannie Lee said. “By partnering with Alipay+, we’re enhancing customer experience by bringing a simple QR payment service within our mobile app—combining broad merchant acceptance with the simplicity of paying and tracking spending in just one place. This is a strategic step in strengthening our payments proposition and expanding our cross-border connectivity, as we continue to build a digital ecosystem that keeps banking simple, safe, and smart.”

Alipay+ empowers banks to offer cross-border payment services via a single integration. The company also works with more than 10 national QR systems, including Malaysia’s DuitNow, Thailand’s PromptPay, and Uzbekistan’s HUMO. This enables banks to scale their mobile payments usage more efficiently instead of having to rely on individual agreements between banks and merchants in multiple markets. The announcement comes at a time when demand for outbound cross-border payments from the Asia Pacific region is expected to increase faster than the international average. Forecasts from FXC Intelligence suggest that this volume could reach $20.1 trillion by 2032, more than double its 2024 levels.

A wholly owned subsidiary of the HSBC Group, Hang Seng Bank Limited is a Hong Kong-based banking and financial services company. Founded in 1933, the institution serves nearly four million customers and counts retail banking and wealth management, commercial banking, insurance manufacturing and asset management, and markets and securities services among its core business activities.

Singapore and Thailand team up to fight digital fraud

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Bank of Thailand (BOT) designed to enhance cooperation in the fight against digital fraud. The pact formalizes and expands on an existing collaboration between MAS and BOT to bolster cybersecurity defenses across their respective financial ecosystems.

“Cyber risks and digital fraud are key transnational threats confronting our region and call for closer collaboration to combat these risks,” MAS Managing Director Chia Der Jiun said.

The agreement calls for the two regulators to share information on cybersecurity and digital fraud, including changes to cybersecurity regulations and threat intelligence relevant to the financial sector. MAS and BOT will also focus on skill development via joint staff training, research exchanges, and policy discussions. Lastly, the regulators will conduct joint cross-border cybersecurity and crisis management exercises to boost operational readiness.

“As cyber threats and digital fraud continue to evolve rapidly amidst growing financial connectivity and technological advancement, closer collaboration between MAS and BOT will help deepen mutual capabilities and achieve seamless cross-border intelligence exchange to counter emerging threats,” BOT Governor Vitai Ratanakorn said.

The Memorandum of Understanding was signed during the 31st Executives’ Meeting of East Asia-Pacific Central Banks Governors in Singapore earlier this week. Among the topics discussed were increased uncertainty in the global economy and the impact of AI on the economies and financial systems of countries in East Asia. The governors talked about the potential financial risks from large-scale AI investment, updates on regional developments in AI and digitalization, and the possibility of using AI to enhance the work of central banks.

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Central and Eastern Europe

• Lithuanian identity verification, compliance, and fraud prevention solutions provider iDenfy unveiled its new bank card verification platform.
• Tech.eu’s Funding Explorer reported a rebound in fintech funding for companies in Germany.
• UniCredit Poland partnered with Flagright to enhance transaction monitoring, customer screening, and financial crime case management.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• UAE-based KamelPay teamed up with Paymentology to launch its new corporate payments platform for businesses, AbsoluteCard.
• Turkish fintech Midas announced plans to expand into payment systems.
• FOO, a B2B fintech solutions provider based in the UAE, partnered with Oman-based Omantel subsidiary, OMPAY, to power its digital wallet.

Central and Southern Asia

• India-based paytech Juspay partners with subscription management and recurring billing platform Recurly.
• India’s Ministry of Finance outlined a number of measures designed to fortify the country’s fintech industry.
• Digital bank easypaisa signed a Memorandum of Understanding with blockchain ecosystem Binance to explore fintech opportunities in Pakistan.

Latin America and the Caribbean

• Nubank announced plans to acquire Banco Porto Real de Investimentos.
• Ábaco, a fintech startup based in San Salvador, El Salvador, raised $53 million in combined venture equity and institutional debt to expand lending to small businesses in Central America
• Mexican neobank Banco Plata has begun the initial rollout of a network of 300 smart ATMs throughout the country.

Asia-Pacific

• Digital payments and fintech giant Ant International secured $1.2 billion in Series A funding.
• Alipay+ partnered with Hang Seng Bank to enable QR code payments in Hong Kong.
• Visa and AI-native financial infrastructure provider Lianlian DigiTech launched China’s first B2B agentic transaction.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• South African remittance fintech eZi Remit teamed up with Mastercard to enhance cross-border money transfer services.
• Nigerian fintech Moniepoint announced new Kenya CEO Rose Muturi.
• African fintech Zazu secured strategic backing from pan-African venture capital firm Launch Africa Ventures.

Photo by Jurgen Lasa from Pexels

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More and more credit unions and community banks are weighing the challenges and opportunities of deploying AI-powered solutions for their members and customers. Yet, while there is much attention paid to the technical details of integrating AI-based technologies into banking operations, there is often less focus on the critical issues of AI governance: the rules, policies, and processes that ensure that a given use of AI is safe, non-discriminatory, and transparent.

With this in mind, this week Finovate First-Timers interviews Lisa Pent, Founder and CEO of PentEdge. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Albany, New York, PentEdge is the company behind AIMS (AI Monitoring & Governance System), a purpose-built SaaS platform that enables credit unions and community banks to govern AI operations confidently.

AIMS provides financial institutions with “AI with Guardrails”, a framework that automates AI inventory, vendor risk assessment, regulatory mapping, and board-ready reporting, transforming complex compliance requirements into a streamlined process. PentEdge made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateSpring 2026 in San Diego, demonstrating this technology.

In this conversation, Pent talks about the predicament that many financial institutions find themselves in when deploying AI solutions without recognizing the myriad risks involved and how to mitigate them. She also discusses the unique challenges that credit unions, community banks, and other smaller firms face when embracing AI compared to their larger rivals. Last, Pent explains how PentEdge’s technology helps these companies manage AI vendor relationships better and more accurately assess risk.

What problem does PentEdge solve and who does it solve it for?

Lisa Pent: Most community banks and credit unions are already using AI. Very few of them know where, how much, or who owns the risk.

That is because AI almost never arrives through a deliberate build decision at an institution this size. It arrives through vendors. The core processor adds an intelligent feature. The fraud platform turns on a model. Marketing signs up for a writing assistant on a corporate card. Nobody stood up an AI program, and yet the institution now carries the risk and the examination exposure.

The consequences are not hypothetical. Earlier this year, a publicly traded community bank disclosed in a securities filing that an employee had uploaded customer information to an AI tool the institution had not authorized. That gap, between what an institution believes it is using and what its people are using, is exactly what we built PentEdge to close.

Our customers are community banks, credit unions, and adjacent regulated firms such as insurers, RIAs, and asset managers. Their supervisory expectations are similar to those on the largest banks. Specific requirements often scale with asset size, but the expectation that you know what AI you are running, and can show how you govern it, does not. AIMS, our AI Monitoring and Governance platform, gives them a defensible AI inventory, a risk score for every tool, and reporting their board and their examiners can rely on.

How does PentEdge solve this problem better than other companies?

Pent: Two things set us apart: the catalog and the scoring model.

The catalog is the asset. We maintain a research catalog of AI tools and the vendors that supply them, built around the technology community financial institutions genuinely use. When an institution tells us which vendors it works with, we can identify the AI inside those relationships rather than asking a compliance officer to figure it out from vendor marketing pages. And because vendors turn AI features on continuously, we monitor the catalog for change, so the inventory does not go stale.

The scoring model is the second piece, and it is aligned to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, which is the closest thing this industry has to a common language for AI risk. Our AI Risk Score separates what we know from what only the institution knows. PentEdge supplies the inherent risk score, combining a tool’s exposure profile with the nature of the AI itself. The institution scores its own controls and mitigants. The result is a residual score that reflects that specific institution rather than an industry average.

The alternatives fall into two camps: enterprise governance platforms scoped and priced for the largest banks, and consultants who deliver a thoughtful, point-in-time document that is out of date within a quarter. Neither serves the roughly 9,000 institutions that make up most American banks and credit unions.

Who are PentEdge’s primary customers? How do you reach them?

Pent: Our market is every US bank outside the top 25 and every US credit union, roughly 9,000 institutions, plus adjacent regulated firms in insurance and asset management. Within those institutions, our buyers are chief risk officers, chief compliance officers, CIOs, and, in smaller shops, the CEO directly. The common thread is not asset size. It is that nobody in the building has “AI risk” in their job description.

We reach them four ways. First, direct outreach to named institutions, which is still the most productive channel we have. Second, associations, which remain the trusted intermediary in this market in a way they are not in most other industries. Third, in-person events, where community bankers and credit union executives compare notes candidly. We were at FinovateSpring and IBANYS this year, and we will be exhibiting at GoWest MAXX in Denver in October. Fourth, education. I publish a weekly newsletter, At the Helm, along with white papers and practical guidance on AI governance for institutions of this size.

Most engagements start with our 48-Hour AI Risk Assessment, a short, concrete look at what AI an institution is already exposed to. It is a low-friction way to see the problem clearly before committing to the full platform.

Can you tell us about a favorite implementation, deployment, or partnership experience? What made it special?

Pent: My honest answer is that every implementation is my favorite, and that is not a dodge. It is the point.

We decided early that AIMS would not require integration with the core. We do not touch endpoints. There is no agent to install, no data pipeline, and no security review of a connection into their environment, because there is no connection. The institution gives us a list of its vendors, an Excel file is perfectly fine, and the platform generates a scored AI inventory automatically.

And the output is not a raw list. From day one, that same inventory produces examiner-ready and board-ready reports at the click of a button, so nobody must rebuild it in a spreadsheet the night before a meeting.

So, the moment I look forward to is the same every time, and it comes within days or hours rather than months. We put an institution’s own scored inventory in front of the people responsible for it, and the conversation stops being abstract. They are looking at their own list, sorted by risk, deciding what to handle first.

What in your background gave you the confidence to respond to this challenge?

Pent: Thirty years of standing on both sides of this problem.

I started in community banking and spent the first half of my career in credit risk on Wall Street, including building a credit risk business from scratch at Helaba that grew past $12 billion in assets, and running a group at Fuji Bank. That work taught me what regulators are looking for, and more usefully, what they are looking for when they ask a question that sounds like it is about something else.

The second half was technology. I spent a decade at Thomson Reuters building SaaS products for financial institutions, then moved into senior leadership at Cognizant. That is where I learned how software gets adopted inside a bank, which is a different discipline entirely from knowing what the software should do.

Alongside that, I have served on boards, and I founded WomenExecs on Boards (WEoB), which put me in the room for a lot of oversight conversations. Board members are being asked about AI right now and most of them have no instrument to answer with.

So when community institutions started telling me they had no idea what AI they were running, I recognized all three problems at once: the risk problem, the product problem, and the governance problem. That combination is uncommon, and it is what gave me the confidence to build PentEdge.

Does AI governance bring unique challenges for smaller, community financial institutions, above and beyond the challenges of deploying AI in general?

Pent: Yes, and the difference is structural rather than a matter of degree. It starts with vendor management.

Community institutions run on vendors, and the volume is enormous relative to headcount. It is not unusual to find one vendor relationship for every one or two employees. Every one carries a contract, a due diligence file, a risk rating, and an annual review. That workload already outstrips the people assigned to it, before AI enters the conversation.

Then AI arrives, and the instinct is to treat it as one more vendor category. It cannot be managed that way. Traditional vendor management is periodic by design: you onboard, you diligence, you review once a year. AI does not hold still for a year. A vendor can turn on an AI feature in a routine release with no contract amendment and no meaningful notice, so the tool you assessed in January can carry a different risk profile by June. An annual questionnaire will never catch that.

The nature of the risk is different too. A traditional vendor review asks about uptime, financial condition, and business continuity. AI raises questions about what data leaves the institution, how decisions affecting members and customers are made, and whether anyone can explain them afterward.

What we hope to do is broader than AI alone. If an institution can see its full vendor stack clearly, with the AI inside it identified and scored, it gains something it has never had: efficiency in that stack (cost efficiency included) and transparency into where the risk truly sits.

You demoed at FinovateSpring in May of this year. How was the experience?

Pent: It has been our highlight of 2026 so far.

The format does something for a founder that no internal exercise can replicate. A few minutes, live, on stage, with nothing to hide behind. You either show what the product does, or you do not, and preparing for that clarified our own thinking about AIMS more than any planning session had.

What I did not fully anticipate was the momentum. The interest was tremendous on the day itself, and it did not stop when we left the stage. The conversations continued through the rest of the event and then kept going in the weeks afterward, and a meaningful part of what we are working on now traces back to that room.

What struck me most was the consistency of the reaction. Nobody argued the premise. Not one person suggested that AI governance is a large-institution problem or a future problem. The questions were all operational: where do we start, what does the inventory look like, how do I explain this to my board. For a founder, that is the best possible signal. You would far rather spend your time answering how than defending why.

I would recommend it to any founder selling into this market, both for the discipline the stage imposes and for the honest, unfiltered feedback you get in the hallway afterward.

What are your goals for PentEdge over the balance of 2026 and into next year?

Pent: Three priorities.

First, make the entry point easier. We recently introduced AIMS Manifest, a self-serve tier that gives an institution full access to our AI tool catalog with its own holdings flagged inside it, along with continuous change monitoring. No institution should have to buy the whole platform to answer the first question: what is our AI risk profile?

Second, deepen the catalog. It is the core of what we sell and the reason a subscription earns its renewal. Through the rest of this year, we are expanding coverage and keeping the mapping between tools and governance expectations current as both sides move.

Third, and this is where we are heading next, we want to be the go-to firm helping community financial institutions optimize their vendor stack, creating both cost efficiency and operational efficiency. That is above and beyond what most consulting firms do in this space, which is renegotiate contracts. Renegotiation is worth doing, but it treats the stack as fixed. Once an institution can see every vendor, every tool inside those vendors, and the risk attached to each, it can ask sharper questions: what is redundant, what is unused, and what is carrying risk out of proportion to the value it delivers.

Into 2027, the goal is straightforward. When an examiner asks a credit union what AI it uses, or a board asks its CEO, the answer should be a one-click report rather than a research project. And when that same CEO asks whether the institution is getting full value from everything it buys, and what risk it is carrying to get it, that should come from the same place.

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

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• ANNA Money has acquired Business Data Group (BDG) and UK Business Forums (UKBF) as part of its goal of building an AI-powered operating system for small business founders and owners.
• BDG is a leading, UK-based independent company formation platform. UKBF is a 160,000-member, online community of small business owners, freelancers, and other professionals.
• Founded in 2017 and headquartered in London, ANNA made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2020 in Berlin.

AI-powered, all-in-one business account ANNA Money has acquired Business Data Group (BDG) and UK Business Forums (UKBF). The move represents the latest effort by ANNA to build an AI-powered operating system to help founders start, manage, and scale their businesses. By acquiring BDG, ANNA will be able to leverage the firm’s formation agents to support startups from formation to the day-to-day tasks of successfully running a business. The acquisition of UKBF will allow ANNA to continue to invest in the UKBF community and bring its business management tools to more small business owners to help them run their businesses more efficiently.

“ANNA isn’t going to compete with formation agents,” the company noted on its LinkedIn page. “We’re here to help them win. ANNA’s success is tied to the success of the businesses we help get started. So instead of competing with the independent agents who rely on BDG’s eFiling platform, we’re investing in the technology, automation, and tools that strengthen their positions.”

BDG is an independent company formation platform based in the UK. The firm offers eFiling and the Partner Program used by thousands of formation agents and their clients every year. Formation agents are professional service providers that help founders and businesses register and incorporate new companies with the appropriate government entities. UKBF is a 160,000-member, online business community and discussion forum where small business owners, founders, freelancers, and other professionals share insights and concerns about running their businesses.

ANNA’s goal is to help small businesses take advantage of current agentic AI capabilities to raise invoices, follow up on overdue payments, calculate and file taxes, and more now, with the aim of expanding capabilities to help small business owners communicate better with their customers, manage suppliers, and conduct a growing volume of the day-to-day tasks involved in running a business “over time” in what the company called “ANNA 3.0.”

“Bringing BDG and UKBF into ANNA is an important step towards that future,” ANNA Money Co-founder and Co-CEO Eduard Panteleev said. “Company formation is where every business journey begins, and BDG’s network means we can now support many more entrepreneurs from day one, with technology that grows alongside them.”

ANNA made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2020 in Berlin. At the conference, the UK-based company showed how its tax and VAT accounting solution manages self-assessment and VAT returns by automatically categorizing and reconciling expenses, and calculating VAT and tax in real time at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated accountant. ANNA completes and submits both tax and VAT returns to HMRC with the support of a certified accountant.

ANNA began 2026 with a fresh capital infusion of £10 million in growth debt from Flashpoint Ventures. The funding helped the firm accelerate the scaling of its Auto Accountant solution designed to help small businesses in the UK meet the new regulatory requirements of the country’s Making Tax Digital mandate. “This funding gives us the firepower to scale at exactly the right moment,” Panteleev said. “As Making Tax Digital for self-assessment comes into force for around 850,000 self-employed people and landlords next year, demand for smart, automated accounting is accelerating fast.”

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

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