Jack Ma’s Ant Financial has gotten itself an American colony. The $880 million purchase of the remittances firm MoneyGram in a deal announced on Thursday looks like a counterintuitive bet in a de-globalizing world for the Alibaba founder’s financial services arm. International payments are a tough business. But MoneyGram gives Ant a base with connections to many developing markets.

Ant piggybacked off the growth of Alibaba, whose Alipay unit received commissions for each transaction it processed over the companies’ marketplaces. In turn, its payments and financial services division helped the Chinese firm expand its e-commerce business. Alipay’s immense popularity at home has allowed it to accumulate 450 million customers.

While Ant has wished to expand internationally, complying with differing regulatory regimes and establishing relationships with all the entities in various nations’ payments chains is a complex process. So it initially limited itself to following Chinese tourists around the world, giving them an option to pay at merchants with Alipay. The company is now steadily scaling up its ambitions as it edges toward an initial public offering.