BANGKOK—May 30, 2024— Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today 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 the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud.

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, the 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 needed a highly scalable, agile environment to build and run the True Money app using advanced AI capabilities. Ascend Money 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 9 in 10 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, ensuring a seamless experience for legitimate customers.

“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 to help improve the accessibility, affordability, and impact of financial services across Southeast Asia.

  • Ascend Money is experimenting on Amazon Q Developer the most capable generative AI-powered assistant for accelerating software development, which generates code, tests, and debugs 30% faster.
  • Ascend Money uses Amazon Rekognition, an AI service for image and video analysis, to analyze a vast dataset of real and fake facial images. This enables Ascend to detect subtle differences in facial features imperceptible to humans, enhancing customer interactions, and 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 to enhance security and user experience with data analytics and ML to optimize performance and anti-money laundering purposes.

“Southeast Asia’s financial services industry is rapidly evolving as the region develops, turning to cloud technology to better serve a growing middle class,” said Vatsun Thirapatarapong, country manager, AWS Thailand. “Financial inclusion is the backbone of any economy. It unlocks human potential, nurtures entrepreneurship, and fuels sustainable and accessible development on a global scale. At AWS, we are honored to work with Ascend Money in powering its critical mission to improve the lives of people across Southeast Asia. Ascend Money has supercharged its rapid growth with cloud technology, and we are thrilled to support Thailand’s first fintech unicorn.”

About Amazon Web Services
Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 105 Availability Zones within 33 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.