Interoperable Payment Systems Are Opening Up Global Commerce: Ant International President

Interoperable payment infrastructure is expanding rapidly across markets, with national QR systems increasingly connecting with one another and creating the base for more open global commerce, said Douglas Feagin, President, Ant International.

Ant International is the global digital payments and financial technology arm of Ant Group, which operates digital payments platform Alipay+ across more than 100 markets worldwide.

“Across Southeast Asia… the national QR system is now being introduced in every single country, and increasingly those are interoperable,” Feagin said at the first edition of the Black Swan Summit India 2026 in Bhubaneswar. “And so the world is opening up… to this,” he added.

Feagin said such developments are reshaping how cross-border transactions and local merchant ecosystems function, especially as digital payments infrastructure becomes more interconnected.

According to a report in Reuters, Ant International and India are in discussions to link unified payments interface (UPI) with Alipay+, to enable seamless cross-border transactions across multiple geographies.

Feagin, speaking at the summit, also pointed to India’s digital public infrastructure as a key reason the country has been able to scale digital payments at speed and expand into broader digital commerce.

“I always cite India as one country at the top of the heap in terms of what has been done here, with the… digital ID and digital payment, and now moving into digital commerce,” he said.

He also underlined that collaboration will be essential as payment platforms and AI-based commerce tools evolve in parallel.

“You need to be collaborative. You can’t have your own solution. Everything has to work together,” he said, arguing that systems will only scale if they remain interoperable and widely usable across markets.

His remarks came during the opening day of the Black Swan Summit India 2026, co-organised by the Government of Odisha and the Singapore-based Global Finance & Technology Network (GFTN) under the BharatNetra Initiative. The summit brought together policymakers, fintech leaders, technologists and global investors to discuss how frontier technologies are influencing financial services, jobs and inclusion.

The inaugural day featured a Global Leaders’ Dialogue on Technology, Jobs and Growth with Feagin alongside Sanjiv Bajaj, Chairman and Managing Director of Bajaj Finserv; Ravi Menon, Chairman of GFTN and former Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore; and Michael Schlein, President of Accion.

Discussions across sessions focused on how digital infrastructure and emerging AI applications could support small businesses, improve access to credit, and strengthen workforce readiness through continuous skilling models.

Odisha’s leadership also highlighted the state’s ambitions to position itself as a destination for fintech innovation and global capability centres, backed by policy stability and a growing talent pipeline.