Cloud-Native Meets AI-Native: Huawei Empowers Banks to Build a Resilient Core

The convergence of cloud-native and AI-native technologies is driving a transformative wave across the financial industry, shifting banking application architectures from traditional, event-driven models toward intent-driven designs. Legacy core banking systems, the foundation of banks' digital operations, suffer from limited scalability and high operational costs. They can no longer keep pace with rapid product innovation or the demands of high-volume concurrent traffic spikes. Consequently, modernizing these traditional core systems on a cloud-native architecture is a critical pathway toward an AI-native architecture.

For 16 years, Huawei has been at the forefront of financial digitalization, delivering modernization projects for more than 100 banks in China. Drawing on extensive transformation practices with banks and ecosystem partners, Huawei has built four key modernization capabilities spanning platforms, databases, engineering, and O&M. As the industry embraces agentic banking, Huawei has officially launched the Digital CORE 6.0 Solution. Leveraging AI, this solution comprehensively upgrades platform architecture, engineering processes, and development capabilities, accelerating the retirement of legacy systems and enabling efficient banking transformation.

Huawei Digital CORE 6.0 Solution Architecture

A Resilient Foundation and Open Ecosystem Forge the Digital Core

Huawei is committed to building a resilient, open digital foundation that ensures the stable, efficient operation of mission-critical banking services. From a resilience and performance standpoint, the solution uses a cell-based multi-active architecture to minimize fault impact, achieving 99.999% financial-grade high availability to effortlessly handle massive transaction volumes. Huawei's next-generation TaiShan general-purpose computing platform, with its ARM multi-core high concurrency capability, has already enabled modernization for over 80% of Chinese banks and financial institutions in eight countries. The solution significantly enhances risk mitigation, strengthens the business foundation, and fully meets the demands of high-load financial operations.

Adhering to an open and win-win ecosystem strategy, Huawei collaborates with leading independent software vendors (ISVs) for seamless core application integration, launching multiple out-of-the-box joint solutions. To date, Huawei has completed compatibility certifications with Temenos for Huawei Public Cloud and Hybrid Cloud platforms; partnered with Riveretech to create a cloud-native core solution for credit cards; and collaborated with SUSE and Alauda to provide a cross-platform container cloud solution. These solutions have been deployed in leading banks across Asia-Pacific and South Africa, clearing a smooth runway for institutions looking to containerize their applications.

Proven Engineering Methodologies Enable Smooth Core Transformation

Building on over a decade of core system deployment experience in China, Huawei has distilled core banking modernization into a four-stage, ten-step engineering framework that covers the entire application modernization lifecycle and ensures smooth, efficient system deployment. The four stages are as follows:

• Planning and design stage: Provide a top-level solution including resource environment planning, high-availability and security architecture design, and an overall implementation roadmap.

• Platform development stage: Focus on rapid cloud platform deployment and end-to-end security system establishment to strengthen the digital foundation.

• Application deployment stage: Collaborate with ecosystem partners to implement application refactoring and seamless migration, slashing planning and design cycles by over 50% while ensuring zero business interruption during system cutovers.

• Operations and maintenance (O&M) stage: Leverage full-link resource monitoring, fault incident handling, and continuous resource optimization to ensure long-term system stability.

This framework consists of over 20 mature migration tools, 50 standardized process documents, and 30 proven use cases, as well as tools, specifications, and references. Together, these enhance the standardization and efficiency of project delivery while providing financial institutions with an actionable roadmap for core system modernization.

AI Agents Support Legacy Code Migration, Boosting Delivery Efficiency by 50%

Modernizing mainframe applications remains a major challenge in banking transformation. Limited IT capabilities, talent shortages, and incomplete business documentation often complicate modernization efforts. Large-scale migration of COBOL systems to Java-based architectures, in particular, entails long timelines, carries high risks, and incurs substantial costs.

To address these challenges, Huawei has combined its AI computing infrastructure with the CodeArts coding agent platform, collaborating with partners such as Stefanini and Sunline, to develop an AI-driven code transformation solution tailored for mainframe offloading.

Leveraging mature AI engineering methodologies and toolchains, the solution covers the full modernization lifecycle, including requirements reverse engineering, system design, code generation, automated testing, user validation, and deployment. This approach significantly improves modernization efficiency, paving a new path for mainframe application modernization.

Looking to the future, as financial application modernization continues to evolve, Huawei remains committed to technological innovation and ecosystem collaboration. Working closely with customers and partners, Huawei co-develops solutions aligned with emerging industry requirements. To validate solutions across diverse financial scenarios, Huawei has established OpenLabs in Beijing, Suzhou, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, South Africa and North Africa. These labs provide effective environments for integration, testing, and verification across a wide range of applications. Meanwhile, Huawei continues to increase strategic investment in application modernization, collaborating with global leading partners to drive solution optimization. Through these efforts, Huawei helps financial institutions modernize core systems with speed and reliability, elevating operational performance.

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