The Borderless Stack: How Malaysia is Engineering Future Commerce with Alipay+

Cross-border payment is hard, and it is where Douglas Feagin started his presentation at a recent May media event in Kuala Lumput. “Payment is not simple, and it’s not like just a kind of open door where you can go do it,” shared president of Ant International, the Alipay+ parent that now runs with its own board.

Yet, 45% of his company’s cross-border transactions already settle on a blockchain. That’s real money, moving in production, every day. “And that was beyond what... any of the institutions around the world,” added Feagin. 

So, while global banking giants are still piloting token platforms, the network executing this at cross-border scale is an ecosystem player born from the ubiquitous QR code. It is the one behind a QR code you have probably scanned in an Asian taxi, and much of the groundwork was laid in China and now in Malaysia.

Solving the three-body payments problem

When it comes to cross-border payment, the obstacles stack up: fragmentation, since “every country has their own idea of how to set up payments”; volatility, since a payment that lands three days late can lose value if the exchange rate turns; and exclusion. By Feagin’s reading of World Bank data, the number of adults without access to formal finance has fallen from about 2.3 billion to under 1.8 billion.

Then there is AI. “How do I trust dealing with agents?” Feagin asked during his hour-long presentation. That question returns at the end, and it is the one the industry has figured out the least.

It is where Feagin pointed at Alipay+ as the solution. Most people assume Ant International exported the app to the world from China and called it such. The truth is that it did not; in fact, it is close to the opposite. 

From 2014, the company took stakes in top local wallets across more than ten markets, such as Paytm in India, Kakao Pay in Korea, GCash in the Philippines, and TrueMoney in Thailand. Then it stitched them together, making Alipay+ the gateway that lets a home wallet pay abroad. “You can use your home wallet wherever you go around the world,” Feagin said.

Today, Alipay+ connects 50 wallet partners. Behind them sit roughly two billion users, about half in China and half outside it. The network reaches more than 150 million merchants and clears over 20 million cross-border transactions a day, which Feagin calls “a small fraction of what we think it can be.”

Essentially, it is the interoperability layer the card networks never built for people without cards. Its great domestic rival, Tencent’s WeChat Pay, matches it inside China, but Ant International has pushed harder on knitting foreign wallets together for travel and cross-border spend.

Why Malaysia is the blueprint

Ant International put its only global Global Development Centre in Kuala Lumpur, staffed by more than 1,500 people, the large majority local. “We’re building for Malaysia, from Malaysia,” Feagin said.

The local wallet is Touch ‘n Go eWallet. Chief executive Alan Ni runs the company behind it — TNG Digital — which is eight years old and now counts 26 million users verified by electronic know-your-customer (eKYC) checks.

“About 90% of Malaysian adults between 18 and 60 have already finished eKYC with us,” Ni said, meaning a passport-and-face scan, not a phone-number signup. Users open the app twice a day on average. “We’re processing more payments than the entire debit card industry combined,” he added.

In 2025, Malaysian e-wallets passed both debit and credit cards by transaction value for the first time, which Ni calls the “undisputed number one.” Cash, more than 80% of offline payments in 2018, has since roughly halved. Touch ‘n Go eWallet’s own share of wallet value rose from 20% in 2021 to close to 80% today.

A regional bank cashes in

Rather than competing head-to-head with a rising fintech force, regional banking giant CIMB chose a symbiotic path. It invested instead and holds a 45% stake in TNG Digital.

Chu Kok Wei, the chief executive officer of wholesale banking at CIMB, ASEAN’s fifth-largest financial group by assets. He was candid about why a banker shares the stage with Ant International. Banks, he said, are known for being risk-averse and cautious and less nimble, and the partnership is the answer.

The clearest example is Budi 95, Malaysia’s targeted petrol-subsidy scheme, which Chu called “the world’s most advanced targeted subsidy system,” covering Malaysia’s whole population. CIMB supplied the government relationship and the balance sheet. The Touch ‘n Go eWallet supplied the phone in every pocket. At more than 4,000 stations, the app works out in real time who qualifies and how much subsidized fuel they have left.

That is the template: public rails plus private reach. Feagin singles out PayNet, Malaysia’s national payment network, as “one of our closest relationships.” Bring in 50 foreign wallets, and PayNet with its local DuitNow QR system lights up every merchant in the country.

Three signals for payments executives

Tokenized deposit is not the 2030 payments story. Rather, it is CIMB building local-currency liquidity pools so that, in Chu’s words, “liquidity arrives before the need arises,” pre-funding instant settlement at 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday when the national clearing system is closed. The bank wants to be one of more than 10 institutions on Ant International’s Whale blockchain platform, which already links the tokenized-deposit systems of banks including DBS, HSBC, and Standard Chartered.

The direction is clear: in June 2026, Ant International moved past deposits, working with French asset manager Amundi and custodian CACEIS to tokenize a euro and USD money-market fund for its own treasury.

The value has shifted beyond the swipe. When merchant fees trend toward zero, Feagin said the money is in “all the digital services on top of payment,” from FX and lending to coupons and travel.

AI now lives inside the transaction. Ant International’s Falcon foreign-exchange model draws on 10 billion parameters to pre-position currency, and its AI Shield flags risky transactions with a claimed 95% precision.

The playing field also levels. Feagin’s favorite proof is a woman in western China who sold a dozen salted eggs a day, took a micro-loan sized to her wallet receipts, and grew into the biggest producer in her province. While banks passed on her for lack of collateral, her payment history was enough for the micro-loan.

Agentic commerce reshapes payments

The near future belongs to agentic commerce. Feagin noted that his product team told him agentic commerce could push transaction inquiries up “hundreds fold.” An AI agent does not just browse or abandon a cart but also reaches thousands of merchants at once, tests, buys, and repeats.

Feagin was not just forecasting. Ant International launched the open-source Agentic Mobile Protocol (AMP), which the company calls the first payment framework built for AI agents on mobile devices rather than card rails, and formally launched it in April 2026. AMP gives each agent a verified identity through a “Know Your Agent” check and an Agent Trust Rating that caps what it can spend. Ant International is among the first firms piloting agent payments on Mastercard and Visa rails, and is working with Google on shared standards. Whoever writes the rules for how agents pay will shape the next decade of commerce.

Asked what all of these initiatives mean to the business he runs, Feagin does not hedge. “The whole payment business,” he says, “may need to be reshaped fundamentally.” And it started in the heart of Malaysia.

Image credit: iStockphoto/efired