Capital A Partners with Ant International to Optimise Treasury Operations for AirAsia
Capital A has formed a partnership with Ant International to improve its treasury operations and bolster its airline business, AirAsia. By utilizing Ant International’s Falcon Time-Series Transformer (TST) Model, Capital A can more effectively manage AirAsia’s cash flows in multiple currencies and provide customers with more stable and competitive pricing.
The Falcon model enhanced foreign exchange risk management and reduced hedging costs by up to 40%. This allowed the airline to offer more stable foreign exchange rates. Additionally, the integration created a scalable treasury management solution that achieved 90% accuracy in forecasting cash flow and foreign exchange exposure on an hourly, daily, and weekly basis.
This deployment represents the first industry-specific solution developed by Falcon. Trained on 2 billion parameters, including 80 million travel-related data points, Falcon was tailored for the airline industry to optimise treasury operations and FX management. The solution has been integrated with Capital A’s corporate banking partner’s fixed FX rate infrastructure to execute transactions for AirAsia. Ant International estimates that the solution could potentially reduce overall FX costs by up to 60% for selected currency pairs within the broader airline industry.
Aireen Omar, Group CEO, BigPay, stated: “This partnership helps Capital A manage multicurrency volumes more efficiently, updating FX rates twice daily and supporting margin management for our users and AirAsia Rewards members.”
Kelvin Li, General Manager of Platform Tech, Ant International, added: “Our collaboration with Capital A is the first commercial deployment of Falcon, addressing FX challenges for businesses and supporting cross-border payment management. We aim to expand these solutions to other industries through our enterprise finance platforms.”
According to McKinsey, the airline sector processes around 2.9 billion payment transactions annually, totaling $1 trillion in value. Airlines spend over $20 billion annually on payment-related expenses. With airline travel expected to reach 5.2 billion passengers this year, Capital A and Ant International are working to provide more efficient foreign exchange management and cost-effective treasury solutions through Ant International’s Bettr Treasury Platform.
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