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By David Zheng, Chief Product Officer, Antom
In 2025, we saw a profound realignment in the global order that reshaped the routes, markets and partnerships that businesses rely on. Shifting trade relationships pushed merchants to explore new markets. AI adoption accelerated faster than many expected. And access to cross-border infrastructure widened, allowing individual sellers and businesses of every size to participate on the global stage.
For businesses, these changes created both friction and opportunity. Many merchants discovered new customer segments, but struggled to scale efficiently. They reached new markets, but faced new fraud risks. They embraced AI tools, but lacked the operational resilience to turn intelligence into measurable results.
At Ant International’s executive merchant event Voyage this year, we spoke about one pattern we’ve seen consistently at Antom: the businesses that remained resilient in 2025 were those that invested in user growth, user retention, and revenue protection.
These three pillars are becoming the new blueprint for navigating global volatility while preparing for sustainable expansion in 2026 and beyond. As merchants’ future-ready payments partner, it is also key for Antom to ensure our AI-driven solutions are always within reach for businesses of all sizes.
1. Scale smarter: User growth and operational efficiency
User growth changed a lot in 2025. Many merchants told us the same thing this year: people were still willing to buy, but reaching new users became harder. Traditional ads didn’t convert as well. Expansion into new markets took longer. And in some regions, users simply didn’t know the brand yet. Merchants needed new ways to put their products in front of the right people.
That’s one reason many businesses turn to tools like Antom’s A+ Rewards growth engine. A+ Rewards works like a built-in digital marketing channel. Merchants can showcase their products or services directly to around 250 million wallet users across Asia who may have never heard of or interacted with their brand yet.
Our A+ Rewards solution has helped many of our leading merchants across verticals like food delivery and travel get in front of new users quickly, without needing to build a whole marketing stack from scratch. Hear from Delivery Hero to learn how A+ Rewards, and Antom’s full-suite solution, has helped them to deliver impact beyond payments.
Speaking of delivering impact, we definitely have to mention agentic payments. When we launched Antom Copilot in June 2024, less than 2% of our merchants were using it. Now, just slightly over a year after its introduction, 72% of our merchants are active users of Antom Copilot 2.0.
David shares how AI solutions like Antom Copilot 2.0 are helping businesses with better efficiencies
Payment onboarding, which can take a typical retail SME in Singapore one to seven days, now takes only ten minutes! With 5 more agents added to help merchants handle end-to-end business needs in Antom Copilot 2.0, including payment optimisation, risk protection and chargeback handling, the efficiency uplift it offers is significant.
Understanding payment habits and optimising payments are now easier than ever. You can quickly see where payment frictions are, where there is downtime, and how you can quickly pause campaigns, rectify fraudulent transactions or optimise payment flows. Antom Copilot helps boost payment success rate by 5% – the highest among all payment optimisation agents in the industry.
2. Deepen loyalty: Optimise user retention and reduce churn
User retention became a real challenge in 2025, and it’s not because people stopped needing the services they already like. What actually changed was how and when people were willing to pay. We saw this clearly across merchants: users were still active, but many dropped off because their payments didn’t go through on time.
Say you’re running a streaming service or gaming platform. If you bill users on the 1st of the month, it might work for some people. But for others, especially in markets where salaries don’t arrive on that date, that timing may lead to unnecessary payment failures. If you shift the attempt to just after typical payday cycles, success rates often improve immediately. Users stay subscribed simply because the payment happened when they actually had balance available.
This is the kind of behavior we help merchants understand through Revenue Booster, our payment lifecycle manager. Using advanced algorithms and data analysis, we examine users’ actual payment behavior and help merchants decide when to attempt a charge. Revenue Booster is our comprehensive solution that looks into pay evaluation, active retries and revenue recovery. This holistic strategy helps increase the payment success rate, and ensures continued service and brand loyalty for the customers.
I do encourage merchants to speak with our team to learn more about user retention payment strategies that work for your brand, or try Antom Copilot on our website to find out more.
3. Safeguard revenue: Fraud prevention for better payment success
As global commerce expanded in 2025, fraud evolved just as quickly. AI-enabled attacks scaled at unprecedented speeds. Cross-border account takeovers became more complex. And merchants entering new regions often discovered that legacy fraud rules don’t apply to more nuanced emerging markets.
This is why our risk management solution Antom Shield became a vital tool for merchants this year. Unlike traditional risk management tools that relied on risk rules or AI solutions that consider specific models, Antom Shield’s AI-driven solution covers 3 dimensions – tableau, time series and graph – giving merchants the most comprehensive fraud protection.
By detecting coordinated fraud and high-risk behavioral patterns early, Antom Shield helps merchants reduce losses without blocking real users. To keep evolving fraud at bay, Antom Shield takes a continuous optimisation approach through ongoing smart simulation and fraud ring detection. For example, Antom helped a leading gaming company go from having 40% of transactions flagged as fraudulent to stable fraud chargeback rate with a 13.5% in payment success rate.
Operating smarter with AI
Looking ahead, most businesses we speak with are asking the same question: “How do we run our operations better?” And after everything that happened in 2025, many merchants realised their systems weren’t flexible enough. Payment flows didn’t adjust to real user behaviour. Fraud tools couldn’t keep up. And teams spent too much time doing manual work that didn’t scale.
So the conversation is now shifting toward solutions that can help people work smarter. AI comes up a lot, and most businesses want something practical they can use to make their daily processes easier. That’s where tools like Antom Copilot come in.
Why Antom Copilot 2.0 is every merchant’s 24/7 AI agent
We spoke about Antom Copilot’s significant role in boosting operational efficiency from onboarding and payment integration to risk configuration and chargeback defence. We’ve also gotten positive feedback from merchants that it’s “like a payments team by your side 24/7”.
Some of Antom Copilot 2.0’s noteworthy agents:
Payment optimisation
- Recommends payment methods, acquiring routes, and integration solutions based on consumers’ geolocation, device, language, currency, and past payment success data
- Provides smart forecast to prevent payment success rate drop, boosts success rate by up to 5%
Risk protection
- Advanced anti-deepfake solution with our comprehensive biometric verification radar winning first place at NeurIPS 2025
- Leading AI risk foundation model based on 7 billion training parameters, with 97% precision for high-risk identification, ensuring the highest level of protection
Chargeback defence
- First AI chargeback agent in the industry
- Detects high-risk transactions before they become chargebacks
- High defence success rate and automated dispute response reducing time spent on chargeback defence by 46%
Chargeback defence, for example, is probably one of the most resource-intensive processes for merchants. With Antom Copilot automating chargeback defence, this common pain point is now turned into a growth enabler for businesses.
Looking ahead
This past year showed us how scaling smarter, building customer loyalty and safeguarding revenue shape how businesses are moving forward. What gives us confidence about 2026 is seeing more companies rethink how they work, from leveraging AI solutions and exploring new operating models.
It’s no longer about just catering to customers’ payment needs, but building better resilience and growing your business beyond just payments. And for us at Antom, the focus will be on making it easier for merchants to do business anywhere in the world.
