The Mojaloop Foundation recently welcomed Ant Group as a new Promoter member to help further our mission of advancing financial inclusion.
We interviewed Carrie Suen, senior advisor, International Public Policy and Government Affairs at Ant Group about what they do and how their contribution will make the Foundation even stronger.
Q: Please introduce yourself and your company.
Ant Group traces its roots back to Alipay, which was established in 2004 to create trust between online sellers and buyers. Over the years, Ant Group has continued to expand our solutions and product offerings to fill in the market gaps and bring more green, inclusive and sustainable changes to the markets globally.
Ant Group is committed to working with our ecosystem partners and policymakers in accelerating regional economic development and fostering an open collaborative and trusted ecosystem. We believe that open source technology is one of the main ways for the global scientific and technological community to come together and cooperate in unlocking more potential and opportunities for wider ecosystem reliably and sustainably. Not only can open source optimize the use of intellectual resources and promote technological innovation, but it is also an important way to transform the R&D achievements of responsible institutions into a trusted foundation for the whole society to accelerate advancement in innovative and mature applications together.
We share the same objectives as the Mojaloop Foundation in furthering digital and financial inclusion for the underserved. Since G20 raised cross-border payments as one of its top agenda items in 2020, there have been a lot of public and private efforts to examine different types of models and solutions or to address the pain points identified. When we come together and share our learnings and good practices, we can drive more awareness of the importance of digitalization and focus on long-term inclusive tools in bringing about more transformative and sustainable changes for all.
Q: Why is the Mojaloop Foundation’s mission of financial inclusion important to your company?
Mojaloop Foundation’s mission of financial inclusion echoes what we believe in at Ant Group. Promoting financial inclusion stays at the core of Ant Group’s environmental, social, and corporate governance vision, which is to create future-ready digital infrastructure which can transform the service industry with enhanced digital capacities and bring small and beautiful changes to the world. We hope that everyone can enjoy inclusive and green financial services and every small and medium enterprise can have equal development opportunities. Through open collaboration with partners, everyone can access digital life services with ease.
Q: What excites you most about joining the Mojaloop Foundation?
In recent years, there have been a lot of public sector efforts in developing a new generation of banking infrastructure to support cross-border payments to scale and remove unnecessary intermediaries in the clearing and settlement flow. This is a welcome approach because the public sector could drive changes as a catalyst in promoting more digitalization in making cross-border payments faster, cheaper, transparent, and more inclusive.
Today, we operate in a very diverse environment where different payment systems exist to serve different market segments and customer needs. Private and public rails complement each other, and there is a tremendous amount of room for private rails to bring more underserved into the system and also act as gatekeepers in ensuring cross-border payments will meet international regulatory and technical standards to ensure scalability.
That is why interoperability and accessibility between public and private payment systems will become instrumental in unlocking numerous benefits for the end users who are looking to scale their business beyond borders. Mojaloop Foundation’s effort in driving more open source software and tools for more open collaborations are very much needed for users to be able to make seamless payments to other users anywhere, regardless of which payment method one chooses.
Q: What will Ant Group contribute to the Mojaloop community?
We are excited to learn from the Mojaloop community and assist in driving its vision of supporting an open-source community for the payment industry and promoting open interoperability across regions in cross-border payments, so no one is left behind. We also look forward to sharing good practices, evaluation of industry trends, and regulatory policies on the forums provided by the Mojaloop Foundation.
