Five years have passed since Ant Group’s listing, which could have been the world’s largest IPO, was scrapped after Chinese government intervention.

Ant Group is remaking itself into a global payments network company and is increasing its presence in the global digital finance market. It is positioning Alipay+, a mobile payment network, as a digital-wallet-linked payment platform spanning Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

Ant International, Ant Group’s overseas business unit, posted about $3.7 billion in revenue after growing 20 to 25 percent in 2025, The Information reported. That was more than quadruple the level from 2019, when it was below $1 billion. Ant International currently accounts for about 10 percent of Ant Group’s total revenue.

Ant International handled $1.4 trillion in funds transfers in 2025. It was below Visa’s $14 trillion, but its growth pace is noteworthy, The Information reported.

Ant launched Alipay+ in 2020. It serves as a digital intermediary between points of sale systems and payment processors such as banks.

Most digital wallet companies Ant invested in joined Alipay+. More than 20 companies without financial ties to Ant also joined, including PayPay, a unit of Japan’s SoftBank Group, and OCBC, a major bank in Singapore and Southeast Asia, The Information reported.

Alipay+ currently links more than 40 mobile payment apps across dozens of countries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. It is used mainly for tourist payments at 150 million merchants in about 100 countries.

Ant International charges merchants fees for processing transactions through the Alipay+ network, then pays part of those fees to wallet partners. The model is similar to how Visa and Mastercard charge fees to individual banks that issue their branded credit cards and to merchants that use their payment systems.

Unlike the Visa and Mastercard credit card networks used mainly in advanced economies, the digital wallets connected to Alipay+ are largely based on QR codes. Ant International’s Alipay+ provides payment infrastructure at low fees to small merchants in developing countries where credit card penetration is low, centered on QR-code-based payments.

Ant International has partnerships with Thailand’s TrueMoney, Japan’s PayPay and Singapore’s OCBC, and it has added a “touch payment” function in South Korea, the Philippines and Hong Kong.

It is also providing an AI-based foreign exchange demand forecasting model used by major banks including Citigroup, Barclays and Standard Chartered, along with global payment processing and currency exchange services for small merchants, evolving into a fintech platform, The Information reported.

In 2024, Ant Group spun off its overseas business into a separate corporation, with Alibaba, existing investors and employees holding stakes. This has increased expectations for an IPO of the overseas unit. Ant Group is also known to be in discussions on linking with PayPal World, PayPal’s global payments network. Douglas Feagin, president of Ant International, said, “We have no plan to directly enter the U.S. consumer payments market,” adding, “We will focus on supporting Asian tourists in the United States so they can pay using their domestic digital wallets.”