Capital A has reduced its foreign exchange (FX) hedging costs by up to 40% through a partnership with Ant International, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to optimise treasury operations for its airline arm, AirAsia.
Using Ant International’s proprietary Falcon Time-Series Transformer (TST) Model, AirAsia improved its management of multicurrency cash flows and achieved greater forecasting accuracy of up to 90% on hourly, daily and weekly bases. This enabled the airline to offer more stable and competitive pricing to customers.
The Falcon AI model, trained on two billion parameters including 80 million travel-related data points, was tailored specifically for the airline sector. It forecasts sales and FX exposures, allowing for more efficient hedging strategies and future-proof treasury management.
Group Chief Executive Officer of BigPay, Aireen Omar said the technology significantly benefits the group’s operations. “We serve over 70 million travellers yearly, 35 million AirAsia Rewards members and our fintech arm, BigPay, has over 1.6 million carded users. Through our partnership with Ant International, we are able to reduce the hedging cost by 40%. This helps us immensely as Capital A processes massive multicurrency volumes every day,” she said.
General Manager of Platform Tech at Ant International Kelvin Li, said the collaboration marked the first commercial deployment of the Falcon model. “The results demonstrate how innovation, technology and institutional-grade execution solve real-world FX challenges and reshape cross-border payments,” he said.
According to McKinsey, airlines globally process about 2.9 billion payment transactions valued at US$1 trillion each year, with payment costs exceeding US$20 billion. Capital A and Ant International plan to expand their collaboration to develop more efficient global fund management solutions through Ant International’s Bettr Treasury Platform.
