How Can Banks Stay Competitive amid Global Digitalization?

Gone are the days when brick-and-mortar banks were enough. Instead, digital financial services are taking over, going as far as the creation of digital currencies and assets. To stay competitive, traditional financial institutions must adapt and transform. After all, users already expect a more convenient and personalized experience that is entirely secure and reliable.

So, how can the financial services sector capitalize on innovative digital technologies to remain future-proof? Huawei believes that the answer is MEGA — multi-domain collaborative, evolving, green, and autonomous — infrastructure.

To stay competitive as the world goes digital, banks need better connections, stronger intelligence, and more flexible scenarios.

Everything around is going digital. Users want banking that is mobile, intelligent, and inclusive. They want experiences that happen instantly and are personalized. To deliver this and more, Huawei relies on higher connectivity, stronger intelligence, and a wider range of scenarios, paving the way for digital intelligent finance.

Full Connectivity

A fully connected system means that financial services are always on and available to more users. Users access a consistent experience across all channels thanks to intelligent IoT.

Internally, higher connectivity refers to the collaboration within financial institutions, making processes more efficient. The entire organization becomes perfectly streamlined as all data assets are interconnected. This leads to more agility.

On the ICT side, the multi-cloud infrastructure reaches synergy and elasticity, because clouds are connected. In the meanwhile, platforms are open, which enables intelligent O&M through high-bandwidth and low-latency networks. Finally, high-performance data storage speeds up data exchanges among clouds while consuming less energy.

Full Intelligence

New technologies will enable comprehensive sensing, accurate awareness, and real-time decision-making capabilities. These will help financial institutions make more data-driven decisions.

Internally, financial organizations can use technology to power their business and drive collaboration on products, marketing, risk controls, and operations. They can also govern data in a more systematic, automated, and intelligent way, since systems intelligently tag, standardize, and visualize data.

Full connectivity and intelligence are the pillars of Huawei's framework for intelligent financial service solutions. We deliver intelligent customer engagement, data-AI convergence, and hybrid multi-cloud solutions to improve customers' digital experiences and build a global ecosystem to help financial institutions go digital.

Financial institutions need digital infrastructure for innovation and sustainable growth.

How can technology support business growth, resilience, and sustainability? Technology evolution and innovation are crucial. When the infrastructure is gradually evolving from closed and centralized architectures to distributed and open ones, banks need innovative digital technologies to deliver new services and personalized experiences.

MEGA infrastructure reshapes computing, storage, and connections, promoting collaboration across technologies and domains at the intersection of business and technology. This helps financial institutions innovate and deliver optimal experiences.

Engagement technologies, like 5G, video, and livestreaming, will make banking a lot more interactive. Cloud and big data will support agile service development, digital operations, and the evolution of core banking systems. Also, data centers will migrate to the cloud, helping financial institutions digitalize.

Collaboration is critical for the evolution towards distributed and open architecture. Huawei has a complete set of ICT products and solutions to enable the collaboration between cloud and networks, computing and networks, and data storage and networks. During design, we consider not just the technology, but how it works for our customers' business. Ultimately, this builds resilience and sustainability.

Digital CORE and data intelligence improve service agility and operational efficiency.

Compared with Internet financial services, traditional players face challenges like slow service rollout and untapped data potential. They need to be more agile and efficient to stay competitive.

Huawei's Digital CORE Solution builds a high-performance and high-reliability architecture based on distributed databases, Huawei Cloud, and cloud-network synergy. In addition, Huawei cooperates with partners to provide professional services, such as integration design, data migration, full-link fault demarcation, and architecture transformation consulting. This will help customers achieve agile service rollout, elastic system scaling, and various innovative services.

Huawei's Financial Data Intelligence Solution focuses on three typical scenarios — marketing, risk control, and operations. Our real-time, integrated, and intelligent data platform helps customers break internal data silos, so that they can easily obtain, analyze, and use data. Huawei also excels in architecture planning and design, data migration, model design, enablement and integration. Such capabilities help customers centralize risk management, enable smart management, and use data for decision making and upgrades. As a result, banks tap into the value of data, which ultimately improves their operational efficiency and service agility.

To date, Huawei has served over 2000 financial customers in more than 60 countries and regions, including 49 of the world's top 100 banks. Huawei will continue to work with financial institutions and ecosystem partners to build innovative digital infrastructure, support business development and innovation, and accelerate digital transformation of the financial services industry.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, products, and technologies of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. If you need to learn more about the products and technologies of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., please visit our website at e.huawei.com or contact us.