Ant Group-Owned ANEXT Bank Announces Embedded Financing Partnerships

SMB financing

Singapore-based digital wholesale bank ANEXT Bank, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ant Group, has launched a new program that aims to use embedded financing collaborations to make digital financial services more accessible for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBS).

The new ANEXT Programme for Industry Specialists is open to eCommerce marketplaces, FinTech companies and digital solutions providers that support the cross-border operations of SMBs, ANEXT Bank said Wednesday (Nov. 2) in a press release.

“With our secure banking capabilities and first-hand knowledge on what it takes to do business digitally, ANEXT Bank is well positioned to help partners unlock more growth opportunities by enabling access to financing to [SMBs] on their platforms,” ANEXT Bank CEO Toh Su Mei said in the release.

“At the same time, industry specialists are domain experts in their respective fields and they can provide deep insights on the challenges and needs of SMBs,” Mei said. “Together, we can create unique use cases and solve financing pain points for [SMBs] at scale.”

For SMBs, the embedded finance products will make it easier to access financing and enable them to monitor and manage it via a suite of services that give them a view of their wallet balance, loan amount, repayment status and other data, according to the press release.

The first two companies to partner with the bank in the ANEXT Programme for Industry Specialists and add the bank’s service offerings for SMBs to their platforms are FinTech company IN Financial Technologies and business process management provider Bizmann System. These companies serve a combined total of 15,000 SMBs, the release stated.

ANEXT Bank started doing business June 2 and is focused on serving SMBs, especially those that focus on cross-border payments.

As PYMNTS reported at the time, the bank is among Ant Group’s biggest overseas drives since its $37 billion initial public offering (IPO) was thwarted by regulators in China at the end of 2020.