Sunline Technology and Huawei: Transforming Global FinTech with Chinese Wisdom

Sunline Technology has always adhered to the principles of openness, sharing, and maintaining a global vision. In the future, Sunline will continue to work with Huawei to promote industry innovation and build a digital ecosystem, to spread China’s leading financial technology capabilities to financial and pan-financial institutions worldwide, accelerating the global financial industry’s digital transformation.

The global economic turbulence we are witnessing in 2020 will likely be more severe and challenging than any other financial crises we have experienced. Indeed, since we entered the industrial era, nothing has stopped human-to-human interaction so abruptly and completely as the outbreak of COVID-19.

Over the past few years, the deepening of China’s financial reform has forced traditional financial institutions to accelerate their innovation and gradually evolve into an open banking model. The cross-border integration with Internet scenarios has led to improved Financial Technology (FinTech), creating unprecedented innovation opportunities for the banking industry.

The outbreak of COVID-19 and the emergence of new post-pandemic economic models will surely accelerate the intelligent transformation of financial institutions in terms of marketing, risk control, services, and operational efficiency.

As one of Huawei’s important ecosystem partners, Sunline was invited to join the Big Data Industry Promotion Team of Huawei’s Kunpeng Intelligent Data Alliance in 2019. Both parties are committed to jointly building converged, intelligent, and open data infrastructure, promoting the innovation and development of the big data industry, and driving the transformation of the digital economy and its intelligent upgrade.

Indeed, Sunline and Huawei have already cooperated on multiple successful cases based on FusionInsight HD, and in 2019, the two enterprises deepened their cooperation at multiple levels. Based on Huawei’s Kunpeng ecosystem, Sunline carried out several tests and innovated solutions such as a converged financial data lake, core banking service systems, and core Internet systems, meeting the development needs of the financial industry regarding security control and digital transformation.

Efficient and Agile Architecture Helps Banks Develop Core Strengths

In the post-pandemic new economic era, banks must improve their pure online financial services, and build an open, secure, and inclusive commercial bank model if they are to prevail amid increasing competition. Put simply, technology-enabled transformation and upgrades are now imperative for banks. Because core systems are key to a bank’s overall core strengths, banks have very strict demands when choosing partners to help them build core systems.

As one of China’s leading FinTech companies, Sunline has been dedicated to using self-developed technologies and products to deliver Chinese-made IT systems for financial enterprises nationwide for 18 years. Sunline builds enterprise-level architecture and core banking systems that support open platforms, micro-service architecture, and unit-based architecture design. With the ability to process hundreds of millions of users and transactions per day, these systems help customers implement digital construction focused on transformation development, improving efficiency and quality, and meeting customer requirements.

Technical platforms such as Sunline’s are the most important underlying technical architecture of a core banking system, serving as the technical foundation for a new generation of core banking systems and determining the support capability of the system in terms of service development. Sunline’s platform uses advanced unit-based distributed architecture and micro-service architecture to enable each unit to work independently and with autonomy. The platform also supports flexible scaling based on micro-services. In addition, the standard deployment unit of unit-based architecture supports horizontal capacity expansion, achieving infinitely scalable architecture, easily meeting the massive transaction and data requirements of banking services. Such advanced technical architecture effectively satisfies all the digital service transformation requirements of banks.

For the banking industry to digitally transform, a comprehensive global solution is needed, and efficient and agile digital operations need to cover the entire banking services process, from production and assembly to sales.

Building an agile technical platform is therefore key to transformation, improving the full process efficiency of the IT system across all phases, from planning requirements and development, to testing, release, and Operations and Maintenance (O&M). Industry players need to use distributed policies to improve operational performance and enhance platform flexibility based on a micro-service framework.

Further, the banking industry must abstract the service themes of digital banking operations and build a service-driven, micro-service capability application center to greatly reduce system coupling and provide platform-based service capabilities for banking operations.

Other important actions include accelerating the construction of an intelligent data middle platform, and improving the efficiency and intelligence of digital banking data applications.

Finally, banks and financial institutions need to build a digital service and scenario assembly center and a sales center to achieve high reusability and replicability of micro-service capabilities.

With mobile Internet, big data, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies rapidly developing, banks in China have already begun to proactively transform themselves, hoping to promote online and intelligent services through digital transformation. With a full understanding of banking IT systems and service requirements, Sunline applies technologies to enable banking services, as well as innovating new technologies based on actual service scenarios, helping banks move to a new development path that gives equal priority to “customer operations” and “value operations,” accelerating the arrival of the digital era for commercial banks.

Distributed core systems of banks based on the Kunpeng ecosystem: A distributed core system is an important foundation for improving the security and controllability of banking IT systems. As an integrated software and hardware system, Kunpeng’s distributed core system consists of an operating system, database, server, network, and storage products from Huawei. With GaussDB and Kunpeng servers at its core, the distributed core system is a complete solution that integrates Sunline Technology’s core banking application solutions. As well as high availability, the core system also supports high scalability, strong data consistency, automated O&M, and risk control. It consists of software, hardware, and databases — all made domestically by Chinese vendors, filling a gap in the field.

Internet finance platform and Kunpeng solutions integration platform: This converged platform integrates the Internet finance platform of Sunline and Huawei’s Kunpeng software and hardware solutions. Featuring standardization, and high availability and performance, it supports the distributed deployment of applications and databases, micro-service-based development and deployment, and rapid horizontal expansion, facilitating quick iteration in Development and Operations (DevOps).

Enabling the Digital Transformation of Financial Enterprises Through Data

Financial institutions have now entered the End-to-End (E2E) digital transformation phase, which covers channels, transactions, and analysis. Data has become the core asset of enterprises, directly enabling business success. Multi-dimensional convergent analysis — from data access and integration, to real-time risk control and quick decision-making — can improve the accuracy of customer profiling, enhance differential service capabilities, and reduce customer acquisition costs. Such analysis also supports the optimization of traditional services and the innovation of digital services, greatly improving the overall operational efficiency and risk control capability of enterprises.

The financial industry needs vertical full-stack data processing capabilities to meet the requirements of massive amounts of data in all scenarios. In addition, the convergence and streamlining of horizontal scenarios can break data silos and eliminate the digital barriers erected by silo-like construction. Major commercial banks and financial institutions have built complete data warehouses. However, most of the data in data warehouses can only be used through reports, flexible query, or mining models. The issue of last-mile access severely compromises the data’s value. But a data middle platform can effectively address this problem, helping banks fully mine their data assets to extract data value more efficiently and economically, in all scenarios.

Indeed, a data middle platform has become a strategic support for service sharing and business innovation, connecting front-end businesses and back-end technologies. Based on years of banking IT service experience and its R&D strengths, Sunline is dedicated to planning data platform architecture and building a data lake for financial institutions, as well as maximizing data value through data service platforms and data asset management platforms. Sunline has developed a data platform solution based on financial service logic and IT architecture. The solution covers the collection, storage and computing, service, application, asset management, and development and O&M of data. The solution supports data accumulation and can quickly respond to requirements and reuse data capabilities, maximizing the value of data assets. This means that the solution can help customers reuse enterprise data services, avoid repetitive construction, lower the cost of siloed collaboration, reduce the workload of the front-end based on common service capabilities, unify service interfaces to improve operational efficiency, and boost the efficiency of both enterprise management and product innovation.

Supported by Huawei’s Kunpeng software and hardware platform, Sunline aims to provide an overall solution for data planning, aggregation, management, computing, and application in the financial industry, to help bank customers build big data capability centers and explore data value in the various fields of risk control and marketing. Finally, Sunline is able to deliver a comprehensive, E2E converged data lake solution. This solution uses Huawei’s GaussDB 200 data warehouse software and TaiShan servers to implement integration from the underlying infrastructure to the data application architecture. The solution also provides comprehensive data warehouse migration products, data warehouse development products, scheduling and Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) products, data visualization products, data services, and precision marketing and risk control products.

Driving Global FinTech Transformation Together

The direction of development for global FinTech has significantly changed since the outbreak of COVID-19. Restricted by the insufficient scalability of traditional core and platform technologies, most financial institutions around the world struggled to cope with the massive surge in transactions (over a relatively short time period), and proved similarly unable to handle the management of corresponding service processes. However, after years spent reforming its FinTech, China’s financial companies have managed to overtake counterparts around the world — in terms of customer base, scenario diversity, transaction quantity, and technological innovation — and in the process have become an important driving force for the development of FinTech worldwide. As a leading Chinese FinTech company, and further encouraged by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Sunline is working with Huawei to provide an integrated FinTech solution for customers, exporting China’s successful and advanced models, services, and technologies to international customers, to help them improve both technological innovation and open capabilities, accelerating their digital transformation.

With many years of experience in the FinTech field, Sunline Technology has provided IT solutions for more than 700 financial institutions worldwide. Four years ago, Sunline began to explore the market in BRI regions, establishing dedicated overseas pre-sales and delivery teams. Sunline has already set up service sites in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Hong Kong SAR (China), with the aim of gaining deeper understanding of these markets. Similarly, Huawei has unique advantages when it comes to implementing financial IT projects at a local level for international customers.

Sunline always takes a global view as it stays true to its principles of openness and sharing. Along with empowering Chinese financial enterprises through technology, helping them explore overseas markets, Sunline will collaborate with Huawei at a deeper level to promote industry innovation and build a digital ecosystem. Together, the two companies will share industry-leading Chinese FinTech with global financial and pan-financial customers, helping the global finance industry go digital.