Ant Group’s ESG strategy aims to support 100 million SMEs by 2030
1.6.2022 06:07:00 EEST | Business Wire | Press release
Ant Group, a global technology provider, today announced its Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) strategy as part of its latest sustainability report. The ESG strategy, which lays out Ant Group’s sustainable development objectives by 2030, will be implemented across all aspects of the Company’s operations.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220531006112/en/
Four pillars of Ant Group’s ESG strategy and objectives by 2030 (Graphic: Business Wire)
Ant Group’s ESG strategy is focused around four pillars: Digital Inclusion, Green and Low-carbon Development, Open Ecosystem, and Technological Innovation. Each of the pillars has a corresponding sustainable development objective by 2030:
- Digital Inclusion: support 100 million small and micro-sized enterprises (SMEs) and serve communities globally
- Green and Low-carbon Development: achieve corporate carbon neutrality and support business partners and the general public to significantly reduce their carbon footprint
- Open Ecosystem: continue to provide a safe, trusted, diversified and open ecosystem to drive common development with partners
- Technological Innovation: continue to invest in core technology research and development to provide world-leading technological products and services
"We believe these are the most important pillars for Ant Group to achieve sustainable growth in a future-facing, responsible, and responsive manner,” wrote Eric Jing, Ant Group’s Chairman and CEO, in the sustainability report. ”This framework will guide Ant Group’s value creation and sustainable development in the future.”
Ant Group formulated its ESG strategy based on a comprehensive assessment of changing macro environment and policy trends, its own development strengths, and inputs from the Company’s stakeholders, including customers, users, employees, partners and governments. The ESG strategy was finalized after extensive management discussions and a detailed Board review.
After solicitating feedback from stakeholders, Ant Group defined 19 material issues for its ESG strategy, ranging from “responsible products and services,” “facilitating industry-wide carbon neutrality,” “cutting-edge technology discovery and R&D” and “transparency & risk management.”
To provide organizational support to effectively implement the ESG strategy, the Company’s Board of Directors has approved the establishment of an ESG sustainable development committee, comprised of a subset of the Board, responsible for decision-making supervision, risk management and policy making. The Company is setting up an advisory committee consisting of internal and external ESG experts to provide input and support. Ant Group has also set up an ESG sustainable development leadership team, led by the CEO and the Chief Sustainability Officer, as well as working groups for each of the 19 ESG material issues.
“Our ESG strategy originated from our own long-term needs and was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. The pursuit of sustainable development has been inherent in every step of our journey and is not designed to cater to short-term trends, but rather a necessary driver to realize our vision to be a good company that will last for at least 102 years,” added Mr. Jing. “A good company is never independently defined. We will listen to the opinions and suggestions from all parties with an open mind and welcome supervision and guidance from all of our stakeholders.”
As part of its “Technological Innovation” pillar, Ant Group has been increasing its R&D investments, which grew at an annual rate of more than 39% for three consecutive years (2018-2021), with total R&D spending in 2021 exceeding RMB 18.8 billion (approx. USD 2.77 billion). These investments enabled the Company to continuously turn technological breakthroughs into innovative, inclusive and reliable products and services to support the digital transformation of industries and better anticipate the evolving needs of an increasingly digital global economy. In 2021, MYbank, an Ant Group associate and an online SME bank, leveraged digital technology to deliver convenient, accessible and responsible collateral-free financing services to 45 million SMEs.
In February 2022, Ant Group was recognized as a Top 100 Global Innovator™ 2022 by Clarivate™. This prestigious annual list identifies global companies and institutions that contribute new ideas, solve problems and create new economic value.
Since 2017, three years after Ant Group’s establishment, the Company has steadily introduced and advanced its ESG assessment framework and published an annual sustainability report, compiled according to the Global Reporting Initiative standards. These reports, including the latest 2021 edition with the Company’s ESG strategy, can be found on Ant Group’s website (Chinese only for now, English edition will be online in the coming weeks).
About Ant Group
Ant Group aims to build the infrastructure and platforms to support the digital transformation of the service industry. Through continuous innovation, we strive to provide all consumers and small and micro businesses equal access to digital financial and other daily life services that are convenient, sustainable and inclusive.
For more information, please visit our website at www.antgroup.com or follow us on Twitter @AntGroup.
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220531006112/en/
Contact information
Media Inquiries
Le SHEN
Shenle.sl@antgroup.com
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
Forrester’s 2027 Budget Planning Guides: After A Year Of Caution, Business And Tech Leaders Are Ready To Invest Again15.7.2026 12:00:00 EEST | Press release
According to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) 2027 Budget Planning Guides, business and technology leaders are approaching 2027 with renewed confidence as they increasingly accept volatility as a permanent feature of the business environment. After a year of more cautious spending, more than 80% of leaders expect their budgets to increase over the next 12 months, with as many as one-quarter anticipating growth of 10% or more. But planning in the age of AI demands more than bigger budgets: Increasing investment without modernizing operating models, strengthening data foundations, and improving AI readiness will only accelerate fragmented data, duplicated work, and technical debt. To realize AI’s full potential, leaders must rethink their strategies and prioritize investments in operational foundations, governance, and experimentation that drive tangible outcomes. This year, optimism is widespread across functions: 82% of technology decision-makers and 91% of marketers expect budget increases
Post-Quantum’s Algorithm - Classic McEliece - Achieves Global ISO Standardization to Protect the World From Quantum Cyber Attack15.7.2026 11:00:00 EEST | Press release
It’s proven that today’s encryption is vulnerable to attack by a sufficiently mature quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm - a catastrophic event commonly known as Q-Day. Even before such a cryptographically relevant quantum computer emerges it is known that adversaries are stealing encrypted data now, which can be decrypted later - also known as Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL). Google’s recent use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to optimise Shor’s algorithm reduces the number of physical qubits required to break today’s encryption, therefore shortening the timeline to Q-Day. This has led prominent experts to estimate today’s encryption may be broken as-soon-as the next three years. It’s against this backdrop that the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) has included the Classic McEliece algorithm as part of its standard for Asymmetric Ciphers (ISO/IEC 18033-2). Organisations from ISO’s 177 member states can now upgrade to Classic McEliece using an international s
Thredd Joins The Visa Agentic Ready Programme, Bringing Agent Network Readiness To Issuers Across Europe, Starting With Zilch15.7.2026 10:00:00 EEST | Press release
Thredd, the AI-first issuer processing platform, today announced it has joined the Visa Agentic Ready programme, enabling issuers across Europe to participate in agent-initiated payments without rebuilding their payments infrastructure. Consumer payments platform Zilch will be among the first issuers on the platform to enable agent-initiated payments for its cardholders. As a processor and enabler, Thredd sits at the trust layer of the payments ecosystem. By joining the programme, Thredd is ready to support Visa and its clients as the market moves into agentic commerce. Agentic commerce introduces a new type of payment initiator: An AI agent acting on a cardholder's behalf. The core payments principles do not change. Cardholder permission, issuer approval, authentication and fraud monitoring all still apply. What changes is how trust is established and enforced at the point an agent transacts. Taking a Zilch customer as an example, a cardholder might ask an AI agent to find a product w
Surgerii Robotics Announces First European Installation of the SHURUI ® Single-Port Surgical System at Vall d'Hebron University Hospital15.7.2026 10:00:00 EEST | Press release
Surgerii Robotics today announced the first European installation of its SHURUI Single-Port (SP) Surgical System at Vall d'Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain, one of Europe's leading academic medical centers. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260713209503/en/ The first pediatric procedure performed with the SHURUI SP system was a nephroureterectomy on a twelve-year-old boy whose kidney and ureter had become infected and non-functional due to multiple stones. The SHURUI SP system is CE-marked for adult and pediatric use, making it the only CE-marked single-port robotic surgical system currently indicated for pediatric procedures in Europe. The installation marks an important milestone in the international expansion of Surgerii Robotics and the introduction of the technology into a major European reference center. As part of this collaboration, Vall d'Hebron University Hospital has become the first hos
SES, Airbus and Dutch Municipality of Noordwijk to Build Satellite Optical Ground Station for EAGLE-115.7.2026 09:50:00 EEST | Press release
SES, a space solutions company, jointly with Airbus Netherlands B.V. signed a ground lease agreement with the Dutch municipality of Noordwijk for a plot at the NL Space Campus, next to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) technical center ESTeC. The facility will host a dedicated optical ground station (OGS) to communicate with the EAGLE-1 satellite and receive quantum safe keys via laser technology. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260714786947/en/ Breaking the ground of the EAGLE-1 Optical Ground Station, Municipality of Noordwijk, the Netherlands. Pictured left to right: Pim van Strien, Alderman for the Municipality of Noordwijk; Rob Postma, President and Managing Director, Airbus Netherlands; Alan Kuresevic, Managing Director, SES Techcom, SES. The station, to be built by Airbus for SES, will consist of a control room, alongside a dome housing an ultra-precise telescope to track satellites, required for the la
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom