Ant International teams with Google UCP to shape Asian commerce

Ant International is partnering with Google on the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) open standard to enable seamless AI-driven commerce across discovery, purchase and post-sale support.

The collaboration empowers Asian merchants with algorithmic control that lets brands customise AI representations of offers, loyalty programmes and memberships while automating engagement without compromising identity. This addresses the shift from human browsing to AI-mediated decisions, enabling businesses in high-growth markets such as Southeast Asia to scale efficiently and compete in agentic commerce ecosystems.

Ant’s EasySafePay solution, powered by UCP, delivers end-to-end trust through verifiable user intent, traceable transactions and multi-party computation-based fraud prevention, including money-back guarantees for account takeovers.

By supporting native payments within AI interfaces like Gemini or Google Search, the protocol eliminates checkout friction.

“For agentic commerce to scale, it’s critical for the industry to align on a common set of standards. We are proud to have Ant International endorse the Universal Commerce Protocol as the foundation for that future,” said Ashish Gupta, Vice President and General Manager of Merchant Shopping at Google.

Headquartered in Singapore, Ant International leverages its expertise in serving 150 million merchants and 1.8 billion user accounts across more than 200 markets, particularly in Asia-Pacific’s emerging economies, to integrate alternative payment methods and ensure frictionless agent-native experiences.

“By leveraging our leading payment capabilities, Ant International is creating unique agentic commerce solutions for merchants by delivering merchant friendly, seamless user experience and end-to-end trust, ultimately driving business growth,” said Jiang-Ming Yang, Chief Innovation Officer of Ant International.

With Ant’s deep APM integration and Google’s AI surfaces, merchants gain tools to tap global consumers to accelerate e-commerce expansion amid rising mobile payments in the region.