Jeffrey Preston Bezos Executive Chairman of Amazon | Amazon
BANGKOK—May 30, 2024—Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that Ascend Money, Thailand’s first fintech unicorn operating the True Money digital financial services app across seven countries in Southeast Asia, is accelerating financial inclusion across the region using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) on AWS.
It is estimated that around 225 million people lack access to a financial account in Southeast Asia, while more than 350 million people do not have access to formal credit. Ascend Money, a subsidiary of Thailand's conglomerate Charoen Pokphand Group (CP Group), serves 30 million underbanked users in Southeast Asia annually with real-time AI-powered credit approvals, accessible investment services, and international payments to over 39 countries.
To drive financial inclusion and socioeconomic mobility across Southeast Asia, Ascend Money required a highly scalable, agile environment to build and run the True Money app using advanced AI capabilities. The company is experimenting with generative AI as a smart coding assistant to optimize and automate engineer workloads like code writing, increasing productivity and the development of new services by up to 30%. According to AWS and Access Partnership's “Accelerating AI Skills: Preparing the Asia-Pacific Workforce for Jobs of the Future” report, more than nine in ten Thai financial firms plan to use AI tools by 2028, citing innovation, better outcomes, and task automation as top benefits. The financial services provider is also using AWS to prevent identity fraud with AI models that can verify facial features in seconds.
“With the scalability and agility of AWS, we can rapidly deliver innovative and secure financial services to millions of underserved users across Southeast Asia,” said Monsinee Nakapanant, Co-President of Ascend Money. “Generative AI and machine learning enable us to automate processes like real-time credit approvals and enhance our service offerings on True Money, driving financial inclusion across the region. AWS is also helping our developers become more productive and creative to deliver personalized financial services that help all communities thrive.”
True Money uses proprietary AI models trained and run on AWS to facilitate personalized engagement with customers, including tailored loan and investment opportunities. The app safeguards customer assets with an AI-powered risk engine that analyzes transaction data in real-time to instantly detect and block fraudulent activity. With AWS, Ascend Money can also automate the approval of fully digitized personal loans in seconds for small and medium enterprises as well as micro-level entrepreneurs.
Ascend Money is experimenting on Amazon Q Developer for accelerating software development by generating code, tests, and debugging tasks 30% faster. Additionally, it uses Amazon Rekognition for image and video analysis to detect subtle differences in facial features imperceptible to humans. This enhances customer interactions while pinpointing identity fraud in loan applications.
With Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (Amazon EMR), a cloud big data service, Ascend Money built a highly scalable data platform enhancing security and user experience through data analytics and ML for optimizing performance and anti-money laundering purposes.
