China's Ant Financial and Thailand's payment enterprise Ascend Money signed a strategic cooperation agreement in Hong Kong.
Ant Financial will implement a strategic investment in Ascend Money and deliver its Alipay model to Thailand, as the company aims to serve over half of Thai netizens in the next five years.
Douglas Feagin, president of Ant Financial's international business unit, said that Ant Financial's globalization push will benefit overseas users and micro enterprises.
Under the strategic cooperation agreement, Ant Financial and Ascend Money will implement cooperation in product technology, business models, and market operations in addition to capital cooperation. Ascend Money will use Ant Financial's business model to expand payment services to allow Thai users to realize shopping and consumption payments with smartphones. Meanwhile, Ascend Money will access to Alipay's global payment system and Thai users will be able to purchase around the world with smartphones.
Suphachai Chearavanont, chairman of Ascend Group, said that Ascend aims to help enterprise users gain more convenient financial services. The cooperation with Ant Financial will accelerate the financial services and platform development in Thailand.
By October 2016, Ant Financial reportedly had over 450 million real-name users, including 45 million overseas users. In addition, its strategic partner in India Paytm had 150 million users, which means Ant Financial provided services to nearly 200 million users overseas.