(Yicai) Sept. 22 -- Chinese financial giant Ant Group announced an organizational restructuring of Alipay, including new personnel appointments, to speed up the development of agentic commerce.

Ant will merge its Alipay, Digital Payments, and Zhima Credit business units into the newly consolidated Alipay Business Group, Chief Executive Officer Han Xinyi said in a memo sent to the staff yesterday. Wu Minzhi, Ant's chief people officer, will also serve as president of the new Alipay.

Wu joined Ant in August 2021. Before that, she spent more than two decades at Alibaba Group Holding, serving as president of Alibaba International Trade Business Group, president of Alibaba B2B Business Group, and chief customer officer of Alibaba, among other roles.

The new Alipay business unit brings merchant and user services, payment product innovation, and credit mechanism development under one entity, aiming to strengthen the merchant service system.

Agentic commerce is poised for large-scale expansion, Han said in the memo. Over the past three years, Alipay has built a solid foundation for the advent of the agentic commerce era through continuous investment in artificial intelligence payment and agent trust mechanisms, AI wallet, personal life assistant Abao, offline tap-to-connect services, and multi-terminal ecosystems, he added.

The core objective of this adjustment is to further consolidate the company’s technology, product, and ecosystem capabilities, and bolster the merchant service system, according to Han.

This restructuring’s ultimate goal is to equip every Alipay user with an AI wallet and life assistant, enable every merchant to better serve users and drive business growth through Alipay’s AI open platform, and make Alipay’s agentic commerce ecosystem more convenient, secure, and trustworthy in the AI era, Han explained.

Accelerating the integration of the merchant ecosystem and encouraging more merchants to connect their services to agentic transaction chains to stimulate greater user demand will be a key objective of Alipay’s organizational overhaul to advance agentic commerce.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Futura Costaglione