AI pushes China-ASEAN finance ties forward

The 23rd China-ASEAN Expo opened on Thursday in Nanning, capital of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, running through Monday and coinciding with the opening of the China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit. Amid the lineup, the financial services exhibition zone stands out as a highlight of this year's expo, which is designed to promote exchanges and cooperation with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Under the theme "AI-empowered Financial Cooperation, AI-enabled Security Governance", the zone centers on three main threads: artificial intelligence applications in finance, overseas expansion of fintech and high-standard financial opening-up.

It showcases the outcomes of China-ASEAN financial digital transformation and innovative AI applications, leveraging digital and intelligent finance to upgrade regional economic and trade cooperation.

Boasting high-level exhibitors spanning the full industry chain and a strong technological profile, the zone brings together institutions under the People's Bank of China, including Union-Pay, NetsUnion Clearing Corporation and the Digital Currency Research Institute. A delegation of 21 financial institutions, led by the country's six major State-owned banks, is also taking part, presenting a full picture of regional financial innovation.

Also represented are seven leading Chinese tech companies, including Huawei, China Electronics, Hygon Information Technology and Ant Group. Covering computing power, large-model deployment and domestically developed hardware and software systems, they form a complete "finance plus technology" support ecosystem, bringing financial institutions, research platforms and tech enterprises together under one roof.

The zone comprises a prologue hall and four themed areas. The hall features progress achieved by the People's Bank of China and Guangxi in advancing China-ASEAN "AI plus finance" cooperation, while the four themed areas focus on future payments, smart chain ecosystems, digital-intelligent finance and cross-border connectivity.

One major highlight showcases Guangxi's progress across areas including data, application scenarios and industrial ecology, all aimed at tackling pain points in financial cooperation.

On the data front, the region has launched China's first provincial-level high-quality anti-money-laundering dataset, alongside a multilingual ASEAN financial corpus. The two resources help ease bottlenecks in the compliant cross-bank and cross-border aggregation of data and language resources.

In terms of application scenarios, real-world applications are being deployed at the UnionPay pilot base, including remote-sensing-enabled AI credit services, e-CNY services for trade, investment and financing, and smart contracts for border residents' trade. These deployments channel fintech strengths to serve the real economy and market entities.

For ecosystem building, China and eight ASEAN countries have jointly issued the China-ASEAN "AI + Finance" Cooperation Initiative, using the exhibition zone as a platform to advance mutual recognition of standards, talent training and industrial coordination.

During the expo, high-quality road shows and sharing sessions will be organized to connect Chinese financial institutions with their ASEAN counterparts and facilitate more effective matchmaking.

Building on the expo's international and open platform, a group of mature, high-quality fintech solutions tailored for ASEAN markets will be rolled out across the region more quickly. This will further deepen China-ASEAN digital finance cooperation and elevate multilateral economic and trade ties.