Ant International has upgraded its Alipay+ wallet gateway, with privacy enhancing technology (PET) now used across all critical operations.
Alipay+ connects 150 million merchants and 1.8 billion consumer accounts through partner wallets.
The company said the update makes it the first live digital payment platform to fully deploy privacy enhancing technology across its payment process.
PETs allow data to be processed and analysed while protecting sensitive information.
Ant International noted that data handled through Alipay+ is encrypted before processing and remains unidentifiable to the company throughout the payment flow.
The update is intended to help partners manage cross-border payments while meeting data privacy and data sovereignty requirements.
It also limits the transfer of sensitive information, as only encrypted data is sent for processing.
“Trust in our systems is integral to our ability to deliver secure and efficient digital services to users globally.
This upgrade enables us to safeguard and strengthen that trust, by giving partners and customers assurance that their data remains private throughout the payment lifecycle – even to us.”
said Jiang-Ming Yang, Chief Innovation Officer of Ant International.
Ant International is also inviting Alipay+ partners to adopt PETs in their own operations, with parts of the codebase to be open sourced in phases.
In Singapore, the Personal Data Protection Commission has issued practical guidance based on Ant International’s use of PETs in a proof of concept for AI model training.
The project showed how Ant International and an e-wallet partner could jointly train a prediction model for customer engagement without sharing or transferring original customer data.
The commission noted that secret shares created during a multi-party computation process would not on their own be treated as personal data by receiving parties in the scenario assessed.
It also stated that organisations remain responsible for ensuring each implementation is robust and provides reasonable data protection.
Denise Wong, Assistant Chief Executive of Data Innovation and Protection at IMDA and Commissioner of PDPC, said,
“We are pleased that Ant International’s participation in IMDA’s PET Sandbox has resulted in the deployment of PETs in Alipay+, a global digital payment solution for many.
This is a significant milestone that demonstrates Ant International’s commitment in prioritising trust with their partners and customers. PETs can be valuable tools to unlock new data opportunities, without compromising sensitive information, and we encourage more companies to join IMDA’s Sandbox to pilot the use of PETs.”
The move also forms part of Ant International’s broader research work with Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Under a master research collaboration agreement, the two are working on trusted AI and secure digital infrastructure for digital payments.
The first phase focused on trusted AI and secure infrastructure. The next phase will continue research into PETs for cross-border payment use cases on Alipay+.
Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by WDnet Studio via Freepik
