Ant International has upgraded its Falcon forecasting program to version 2.0 and secured contracts with six major banks to use the model in foreign currency trading activities. Kelvin Li, Ant International's general manager of platform technology, named Citi, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, and Barclays as partners in the initiative.
According to Li, precise forecasting through the transformer-based model—which features nearly two billion parameters—can reduce foreign exchange hedging and allocation costs by over 60%. Ant released the 2.0 version in an arXiv technical report and published its code on GitHub.
Several partner institutions have already integrated the technology into existing operations. In July 2025, Citi launched a Falcon pilot alongside its Fixed FX Rates product. Standard Chartered combined Falcon with its Aggregated Liquidity Engine, achieving over 90% accuracy in forecasting currency exposures and decreasing liquidity management costs by 50%, according to the bank. HSBC partnered with Ant on foreign exchange forecasting as well as tokenized currency, creating a Tokenized Deposit Service and processing a cross-border payment using the ISO 20022 messaging standard.
The rollout arrives amid increased global currency risk. According to the Bank for International Settlements, global foreign exchange turnover averaged $9.5 trillion a day in April 2025, representing a 27% increase over three years, driven in part by firms hedging dollar exposure following US tariff announcements. High interest rates since 2022 have further raised hedging costs for investors.
Despite the operational efficiencies, the technology introduces potential regulatory concerns. Financial Stability Board work summarized by the BIS in June 2025 highlighted that financial institutions relying on a small group of AI providers or similar models could create system-wide vulnerabilities, where shared signals and dependencies might lead to correlated decisions during market stress.
Ant International recently raised $1.2 billion in an equity financing round to support the expansion of its financial AI tools across global banking operations.
