Boost Resilience, Reshaping Smarter Finance Together

Nowadays, industries and technologies are evolving rapidly. The finance industry is experiencing four concurrent development stages: late stage informatization, mature stage mobility, the growth stage of the ecosystem, and the exploration stage of intelligence.

From a technical perspective, we are facing challenges new and old. Technical debts remain unresolved, and generative AI has new wind in its sails. To fully embrace the intelligent world, the finance industry must develop four key capabilities.

Firstly, we need to enhance resilience to ensure always-on services. Secondly, we should accelerate application modernization to achieve business agility. Thirdly, we can realize the value of intelligence to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Finally, we need to build a thriving ecosystem for scenario-based innovation.

Jason Cao, Vice President of Huawei and CEO of Huawei Digital Finance BU, delivered a keynote speech at the forum.

China has made a transformation in financial services on a monumental scale in just 12 years. Back in 2011, only 38% of people in China used bank cards, mobile payments were just starting, and cash was the primary payment method. Currently, 86% of transactions are mobile payments, and 95% of the population have bank accounts. China has emerged as a global leader in going cashless.

At the same time, China's banks have gone digital too. They have digitalized their end-to-end business operations, from customer interaction, to product services, and to risk control. Top banks have completed a cloud-based IT architecture transformation, utilizing cloud services throughout their organization. Other leading banks have adopted a data-driven approach and are now exploring the potential of intelligence. China has spent 12 years transitioning to a cashless society, and this trend is now being observed worldwide. The transformation experience of Chinese banks provides valuable insight for others looking to follow suit.

Huawei has been engaged in the finance industry for 13 years and has been part of this financial service transformation in China. Up to now, Huawei has served more than 3,600 financial customers worldwide, including 53 of the world's top 100 banks.

Over the past decade, Huawei's strategy has changed from All IP to All Cloud and now to All Intelligence. Similarly, our strategy in finance has also evolved. Initially, we provided reliable hardware, followed by high-availability software. Now, we are developing systematic solutions to solve complex challenges facing the industry.

During this process, Huawei's products are becoming increasingly competitive. Huawei has been consistently named a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for its high-end storage and datacom products. In 2023, Gartner named Huawei GaussDB as a Customers' Choice. In recent years, many customers have praised Huawei as their best digital transformation partner.

In the finance industry, we focus on helping customers reshape resilience, agility, and intelligence.

Huawei's value to customers extends beyond its visible products and solutions. It also has the expertise behind leading practices worldwide, a glocal open ecosystem, and an extensive talent system, which are more crucial to the success of customers' transformation.

Reshape Resilience: Building 4-Zero Infrastructure

AI has significantly transformed financial services.

Digital payments are experiencing rapid growth worldwide, with transaction peaks reaching hundreds of times the daily transaction volume. Despite this growth, service interruptions and cyber attacks remain prevalent. In 2023, top banks in Africa, Latin America, and Asia Pacific experienced service outages lasting over 24 hours. In this era, resilience is crucial. To shift from system resilience to user journey resilience, resilience itself must be reshaped. Therefore, we have proposed a goal for resilient financial infrastructure: the four zeros.

Zero Downtime: Stability is the cornerstone of digitalizing financial services. To achieve stability, the active/standby architecture is advancing to active-active, and ultimately to a multi-site multi-active high-availability architecture.

Zero Wait: In today's fast-paced world, speed is a critical factor in attracting customers, be it for real-time payments, ultra-fast transactions, or second-level credit approvals. To ensure a high-performance experience for transactions and analysis, we must continually overcome architectural limitations.

Zero Trust: As viruses and ransomware continue to evolve, the competition between attack and defense becomes a race against time. We need to help our financial customers achieve in-depth security across their campuses, data centers, and clouds, to accelerate attack detection, isolation, and recovery.

Zero Touch: We expect to detect faults in 1 minute, locate them in 3 minutes, and recover services in 5 minutes. This year, our autonomous driving network solution has upgraded from 1-3-5 to 0-1-3-5, and we use AI to ensure zero configuration errors.

Reshape Agility: Accelerating Application Modernization

As the global financial service industry undergoes transformation, traditional banks are facing significant competition from digital banks and fintech players. To stay ahead, it is essential for them to digitalize their services to attract new customers and retain existing ones. The key to success in finance is the "platform + service" mode, which must be implemented through application modernization.

To achieve overall business agility, we need to adopt the public cloud for the rapid innovation and delivery of new services. We must simultaneously modernize traditional services step by step to migrate them smoothly to the cloud.

Traditional banks with a large customer base can also achieve agility through on-premise cloud native transformation. Meanwhile, digital banks can leverage the public cloud to rapidly develop new products and services, attracting customers and driving business growth. These two capabilities are essential for successful modernization.

To facilitate financial application modernization, Huawei has built hierarchical solution capabilities.

The bottom layer is a solid hybrid multi-cloud foundation.

The second layer consists of three engines, including high-performance CCE, distributed database GaussDB, and CodeArts for software development.

The top layer consists of N dimensional professional services that Huawei provides throughout customers' modernization process, including planning, platform construction, application integration, and O&M. These make migration smooth and facilitate the modernization of applications.

Reshape Intelligence: Developing Diversified Intelligence and Strengthening the Data Foundation

AI is rapidly changing our lives and work. The finance industry's intelligent transformation has progressed from the widespread use of AI assistants to the innovation of intelligent twins, and ultimately to AGI, speeding up the shift towards AI Banks.

Huawei will continue to unlock the potential of large AI models in the finance industry. Up to now, we have worked with our customers to implement AI in over 20 scenarios, including AI4Data, AI4Business, and AI4IT, which are enhancing intelligence and creating greater value in finance.

High-quality data is the basis for AI development. Therefore, we are constantly improving our data capabilities to offer the best possible data usage experience through three measures. Our data intelligence solution has been utilized by over 100 financial institutions worldwide.

1） Architecture: To create a superior system experience, we have built an enterprise-level data platform to break data silos and ensure efficient data supply.

2） Governance: To deliver an optimal user experience, we have reshaped data workflows and transformed from data management to data operations.

3） Scenario: To ensure an ultimate business experience, we have worked with partners to enrich data applications and change from data defense to data offense.

Collaborating with Global Partners to Create New Value

To share our successful practices globally, we have developed partnerships with world-leading industry solution providers and those with unique advantages in specific market segments, with a focus on resilience, agility, and intelligent solutions.

Our goal is to provide customers with the best industry practices, high-quality services, and innovative capabilities that support their businesses and architectures, accelerating the digital transformation of the global financial industry.

Our solutions have contributed to the business success of our customers in the past. Moving forward, we will continue to expand our ecosystem and work closely with our partners and customers to shape the future of digital finance.