(Yicai) Sept. 14 -- MYbank, the Chinese internet-only lender backed by Ant Group, has unveiled its first artificial intelligence agent dedicated to inclusive finance for small and micro businesses. The launch signals that AI has now been embedded across the bank’s core operations, including risk control, loan approvals, marketing, and product development.

Bailing 2.0 provides services such as credit, bill financing, and tax/financial management to 42 million small and micro enterprises, Hangzhou-based MYbank announced at the four-day Inclusion Conference on the Bund, which ended in Shanghai yesterday.

Set up by Alibaba Group’s fintech affiliate Ant, MYbank opened for business in 2025 to serve small businesses, sole proprietors, and underserved borrowers and has become one of China's largest providers of tech-driven inclusive finance. Its launch of Bailing 2.0 is an example of how AI is moving beyond chatbots and copilots toward autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, coordinating tools, and executing workflows.

Bailing 2.0 acts as the “chief financial officer” for small and micro enterprises, according to MYbank President Feng Liang.

“AI models provide unprecedented intelligence, while AI agents offer the ability to interact with customers, generating real-time, high-quality, multimodal context and demonstrating a deep understanding of customer needs, and support a collaborative workflow among multiple experts,” Feng said.

The launch of large-scale, differentiated service solutions for customers cane take at least six days, but it now takes just one hour with Bailing 2.0, the bank said. The change extends beyond the speed of solution generation to the very nature of the relationship between human employees and AI, it pointed out.

“Previously, human employees came up with solutions while AI served merely as a tool,” Qian Jiani, general manager of digital operations at MyBank, told Yicai. “Now, AI generates solutions for merchants before human staff make the final confirmation.”

Underlying this shift is the bank's newfound ability -- enabled by the AI agent -- to customize financial services for individual small and micro businesses, Qian pointed out.

Every financial service request from a bank client often needs to go through multiple steps, including risk control, review and approval, marketing, and research, which are scattered across various departments, making it difficult to allocate and mobilize them flexibly. But an AI agent can turn these specialezed skills into module, on-demand capabilities that can be called upon to quickly plan and review projects.

MYbank has redefined the division of labor to improve human-AI collaboration. AI agents handle information gathering, analysis, execution, and other high-priority tasks, while humans set standards, review results, make judgments at key proints, and promptly take over tasks from AI under special circumstances.

AI agents can identify the underlying intent behind a user’s request, connect that need with relevant banking products and services, convert loosely defined business objectives into specific financing plans, and help complete application processes.

For example, tens of thousands of merchants and farmers impacted by typhoons in China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region this summer received custom financial service plans from MYbank within an hour after disaster struck, a process that used to take at least six days.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev