Shanghai, China – Media OutReach Newswire – July 20, 2026 – On July 17, the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) officially opened in Shanghai. UnionPay announced three unique AI technologies developed for the financial sector at the Shanghai exhibition hall: a financial transaction time series foundation model, an Agentic Payment Open Protocol (APOP) framework, and a privacy-preserving large-scale language model inference solution. As the AI era evolves, this showcase highlights UnionPay’s continued efforts to accelerate the adoption of digital and intelligent technologies.
On July 18, UnionPay hosted the AI Application National Pilot Base (Financial Sector) Phased Results Presentation at the UnionPay Center in parallel with WAIC 2026. The event attracted more than 100 representatives from commercial banks, Chinese and overseas partners, leading technology companies, academia, and research institutions. During the event, UnionPay unveiled the “1+6+N” AI outcome framework, announced a series of industry partnerships, and launched a joint initiative that seeks to strengthen cooperation in financial industry development and governance. These achievements demonstrate the National AI Application Pilot Base’s progress in building an open innovation platform that accelerates AI adoption across industries.
Dong Junfeng, chairman of China UnionPay and UnionPay International, attended the event and delivered a keynote speech. He pointed out that AI is rapidly reshaping the financial industry. Since its launch in 2025, the National AI Application Pilot Base has delivered many meaningful results through close industry-wide collaboration. Mr. Dong elaborated on his vision for base development from three aspects: sharing, collaborative governance, and mutual benefit. First, by pooling computing resources, data, and models on a central, public platform, this base helps address industry challenges such as the high cost of computing resources and data silos. This lowers the barrier to AI adoption across the financial industry. Second, the base strengthened AI security by building robust safeguards for large-scale language models and applying AI to enhance transaction risk management and cybersecurity. These efforts are undertaken to support a safer and more resilient financial ecosystem. Third, this base is accelerating the adoption of AI across real-world use cases. The company has developed a wide range of commercial AI solutions spanning payment on behalf, credit risk management, consumption facilitation, and merchant digital transformation, turning technological innovation into tangible business value. Looking ahead, the future of AI + finance holds great potential. UnionPay looks forward to working with partners across industries to build an open, shared, and well-governed financial AI ecosystem that supports the development of new productive capabilities through innovation.
The highlight of the event was the official launch of UnionPay’s “1+6+N” AI performance framework.
“1” stands for integrated portal, or National AI Application Pilot Base. Built on a “one portal, six centers” structure, it integrates six specialized centers covering models, datasets, applications, talent development, supply and demand matching, and financial services. Currently, the platform hosts 11 models, 14 datasets, 59 demonstration applications, and 61 services, integrating a total of 145 core resources.
The “6” refers to six independent and controllable capabilities, including scheduling of computing resources through a trusted intelligent computing sharing platform, high-quality financial datasets, finance-specific foundational models, AI-powered financial security services, financial AI standards, and a pilot test sandbox to support model training and evaluation. These six capabilities work together to form the base’s shared technology foundation, providing core technology infrastructure to ecosystem partners.
“N” stands for a portfolio of benchmark use cases, standardized AI solutions, and demonstration applications built on this technology foundation. These applications span five key areas: Intelligent Payments, Inclusive Finance, Consumption Growth, Risk Management and Compliance, and Operational Excellence, creating a multi-tiered product portfolio serving consumers, merchants, local governments, and financial institutions. This accelerates the application of AI capabilities across a variety of use cases.
The underlying 1+6+N framework connects computing power, data, models, and use cases to form an end-to-end value chain. By addressing common industry challenges such as limited computing resources, data silos, and high costs of AI deployment, we deliver standardized and widely accessible AI capabilities, providing the financial industry with a reusable, highly secure, one-stop AI solution for intelligent transformation. This reflects UnionPay’s commitment to not only driving its own business growth, but also enabling the industry through strengthening foundational capabilities and financial infrastructure for the AI era.
These results are already being delivered to industry partners and are starting to generate value. For banks, acquirers, and other financial institutions, UnionPay’s shared infrastructure provides rapid access to mature financial AI capabilities without the need to build systems from scratch, significantly reducing both technical barriers and implementation costs. For merchants, UnionPay provides AI-powered marketing, digital analytics, and intelligent risk management tools to support smarter operations, improve customer engagement, improve operational efficiency, and enable small and medium-sized businesses to benefit from AI innovation. For technology companies and other ecosystem partners, this foundation enables partners to quickly adapt AI products to financial applications and complete compliance validation, accelerating the commercialization of innovations.
The event also saw a six-round partnership signing ceremony covering areas such as AI-themed cards, the development of a cross-border agent payments ecosystem, AI-powered operational enhancements for merchants, co-commercialization of pilot-based innovations, and broader ecosystem collaboration across the financial industry chain.
After the signing ceremony, UnionPay announced its initiative on co-development and governance of AI applications in financial services, and representatives from participating organizations joined on stage to witness the launch. Based on the “1+6+N” framework, the initiative calls on industry players to collaborate in four areas: One is to promote trustworthy AI systems that serve the real economy by establishing traceable and explainable algorithmic governance mechanisms while protecting data privacy and security. Second, we will strengthen collaboration between industry, academia, research institutions, and users, leverage the foundation to jointly promote core technologies, and develop an independent and secure financial AI infrastructure. Third, we promote openness and inclusivity by sharing mature AI models, testing services, and implementation solutions, reducing the cost of intelligent transformation, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. Fourth, improve lifecycle governance through tiered risk management, enhanced compliance standards, and coordinated risk prevention. Aiming to foster the healthy development of AI in the financial sector and advance digital finance through technological innovation, the initiative calls on all industry players to collaborate by jointly strengthening their foundations, unlocking greater value through common capabilities, and strengthening collaborative governance.
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