'It's Like A Lego'—Ant International's $111 Trillion SME Bet

A custom horseshoe maker in Tasmania sells to 180 markets. The shoes are made for individual horses on order, shipped from one Australian island, paid for in over a hundred different currencies. The horseshoe maker is one of the customers Clara Shi, CEO of WorldFirst and Vice President of Ant International, picks out when explaining why the company her platform serves is not the same as the company most cross-border payment infrastructure was built for.

"It’s actually one global account, multi-currency with all the cross-border pooling and instant cross-border funds movement entirely embedded," Shi said on the On The Margin podcast. "They don't need to understand what cross-currency pooling or what sweeping or the FX is. Everything is actually built into one, with the feel that it's just one account."

The pitch is simple. The pitch is also, in Shi’s framing, the only one that scales. Coca-Cola and Apple do not need cross-border infrastructure that flexes to a horseshoe maker. The 1.6 million SMEs WorldFirst serves under Ant International's broader 150-million-merchant umbrella do.

Permanent white water

The macro tailwind is real and unwelcome. The International Council for Small Business 2025 Annual Global MSME Report coined the phrase "permanent white water" to describe the nonstop turbulence small and mid-sized firms now face from tariff swings, geopolitical fragmentation, supply-chain reroutes and rapid digital transformation. Shi’s read of the same shift is operational. "The trend started during COVID, that’s when it accelerated a lot," she said. "The first one is actually diversification. In the past, we always talked about globalization. Nowadays, we talk about regionalization or localization. We see diversification in terms of the export markets, as well as supply chain diversification."

The implication for a payments company is direct. "What we do is actually to follow our customers," Shi said. "When they do the diversification, that means we need to go together with them. We need to get ourselves ahead of our customers. When they go to Africa, for example, in terms of the supply chain, we need to be in African markets, either working with the local partners or directly applying for licenses to build the infrastructure locally so that we can serve them when they go there."

McKinsey's 2025 Global Payments Report, published in September, framed the broader landscape as moving toward two possible end states, both more fragmented than today: a multirail ecosystem with global passkeys, or increased localization and the decline of worldwide standards. Shi's view is that the SME segment is where that fragmentation hurts most. "The P2P and SME cross-border payments space," McKinsey's report noted, "is brimming with competition, which expands choice for customers and requires a response from banks." Banks have generally not responded fast enough; that is the gap WorldFirst targets.

The Lego-like modular architecture

The product Shi keeps coming back to is the Global Account, a single onboarding that gives a merchant access to more than 40 local-currency accounts across major jurisdictions. "One time onboarding, we know you, and you can immediately have the access to the multiple local currency accounts in various jurisdictions," Shi said. "Today we actually offer more than 40 collection currencies, local accounts for the merchants so that they can do cross-border business and just collect like a local."

Underneath the account, Ant International has spent five years building what Shi describes as an in-house real-time payment system that connects to more than 20 institutions and can move 25 currencies instantly. The deposit balances on those rails are tokenized, allowing the bank-to-bank movements that ordinarily clear in days to settle in seconds. The architecture is the deliberate choice that makes the rest of the product possible.

The way Shi describes the company internally is the phrase. "It’s like a Lego," she said of the modular API stack offered to enterprise customers. "The modules, APIs, you need acquiring. OK, just to get the acquiring APIs. If you need accounts, just to get the accounts API. If you need AI effects, you need us to provide the AI projection for your FX exposure or the dynamic pricing tools, then you just get the effects. So it's like a Lego game. Get whatever you need."

For SMEs, the bundle is one switch; for enterprises, it is composable. The same infrastructure underpins both. The acquiring side of the business connects to over 300 alternative payment methods across more than 200 markets, the strength Shi names when asked how WorldFirst differentiates from Stripe and Adyen. "I think the strength is the alternative payment methods, particularly in those emerging markets," she said.

AI as the compounding edge

Ant International began applying AI to its own operations long before the term became boardroom shorthand. "AI actually started from our internal use cases," Shi said. "Even before AI was so popular, we used it to improve efficiency internally, using AI to help our customer service to improve, and to improve the risk engine, the credit engine."

The internal use cases became external products. The clearest example Shi gave is dynamic ticket pricing for airlines, an industry she singles out because it has historically priced in dollars and euros and absorbed the FX risk of selling locally. "But through our dynamic pricing module, AI will give a pricing strategy depending on the departure time, the payment methods, ticket size. So that pricing module exists to price flight tickets in the local currency."

The hedging benefit is what closes the loop. "When they price in the local currency, inevitably they’re exposed to FX exposures. How can (airline companies) come up with a precise projection of that FX exposure so that they can lock in an FX rate?" Shi said. “We have a model called the Falcon Time-Series Transformer that helps forecasts this with AI”.

The accuracy of the forecast directly compresses the cost of the hedge; that compression is what Ant resells to its airline customers.

The same logic now powers what Shi calls Antom Copilot, which is integrated into Ant's enterprise solutions that aims to help SMEs navigate payment complexities as they expand globally. Among its AI-powered features are liquidity management and treasury features, as well as a tax-and-compliance assistant offered through partners including EY.

"We use AI to help us manage the liquidity risk that comes to that RTP, the blockchain, the real-time payment system we built in-house," Shi said.

Where the bet sits

Juniper Research has projected that B2B cross-border payment volumes will exceed $111 trillion globally by 2027. The bet Ant International has placed, beneath every Lego brick, is that fragmentation makes that figure harder, not easier, to capture for traditional incumbents. Stripe, Adyen and PayPal grew their share by serving Western enterprise customers first. Ant's wager is that the next leg of growth flows through Filipino, Indonesian, Thai and Latin American small businesses that have always paid 5% to 10% to ship a 90% of revenue overseas.

One of WorldFirst’s largest offices today is in London, Shi said, evidence the company is courting outbound European SMEs as well as inbound Asian ones. It has served upwards of 1.6 million customers. WorldFirst sits as one of Ant International’s several brands aimed at helping SMEs grow – others include Alipay+, which handles cross-border digital-wallet payments from travelers and remote shoppers and Antom, which handles online merchant acquiring. WorldFirst handles the multi-currency account; whilst another brand called Bettr handles SME financing built off alternative data.

Today, Ant International supports more than 220 markets, with more than 30 offices globally as it connects its over 150 million merchants with over 2 billion user accounts. Asked what the macro environment now demands, Shi was direct. "All those may increase the uncertainty," she said of tariffs and geopolitics. "And the uncertainty becomes extremely challenging for not only for us, but also for our customers, for everyone. So that uncertainty means we need to build much stronger resilience … to help our customers with diversification."

What the rivals do not have

The cross-border SME tier is overcrowded; what is not crowded is the operator with both Asia-Pacific home-ground depth and a license footprint that lets a London office sell into European outbound flows. McKinsey’s report noted that SME executives say pricing, intuitive FX hedging tools and tailored disbursements into wallets, accounts and cards drive their choice of provider. The first two have historically been reserved for large corporate clients; the third is the part the wallet-first acquirers have built best. Ant International's claim is that it ships all three under its modular structure.

That bet does not depend on the specific brand winning. It depends on the assumption that "permanent white water" continues, that the Tasmanian horseshoe maker keeps shipping into 180 markets, and that whoever can wrap one onboarding around 40 currency accounts and a real-time settlement layer will eat enough of the $111 trillion to matter.

I have reported on the broader race to build fintech everything-apps. Ant International is the version of that fight where the player already has millions of SME customers and a local-team rollout in markets the incumbents stopped trying to underwrite years ago. The horseshoe maker is, in that sense, the customer most worth being chased.