Chinasoft International and Huawei Build Financial Digital Infrastructure Together

Ahead of the imminent digitalization of the entire financial industry, financial enterprises need to take into account the needs of the industry ecosystem, services, management, and customers when they invest in digital technologies. While considering the requirements for both real-time operation and future innovation, these enterprises must develop strategies that are both forward-thinking and pragmatic.

As China returns to some sense of normality, following the lockdown period associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the “One Belt, One Road” and “New Infrastructure” initiatives are gaining fresh investment. China’s financial industry, too, is also attracting new investment and finding further opportunities. Meanwhile, data centers and digital infrastructure — such as 5G — are driving the digital transformation of the finance industry.

How Do Financial Service Enterprises Deploy FinTech?

Ahead of the imminent digitalization of the entire financial industry, financial enterprises need to take into account the needs of the industry ecosystem, services, management, and customers when they invest in digital technologies. While considering the requirements for both real-time operation and future innovation, these enterprises must develop strategies that are both forward-thinking and pragmatic.

To meet that need, Chinasoft International — a Beijing-based investment holding company, with expertise in financial technical services, business strategies, and technology-driven methodologies — proposes nine principles for the technical deployment of financial enterprises.

Business strategy orientation: Digital transformation should align with an enterprise’s overall strategy, which means it is important to avoid generic transformation methods and ensure that any transformation adds tangible value to the business.

Systematic implementation: Enterprise governance and digitalization are gradual processes, which can’t be achieved overnight, so investment in these areas should be steady.

Standards-based: Sustainable standardization of services is vital to achieving digitalization.

Five aspects of closed-loop evolution: When enterprises digitalize, they should consider service data, data assets, asset science and technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and intelligent scenario-based services — to form a closed-loop from service data to data service.

Embracing new technologies and systems: By working with new technologies, we can gain a better understanding of the technological cycle, to ensure new technologies are reliable.

Data asset core: The motive driving the digitalization of financial institutions is the wish to maximize the value of information assets. Customer and financial transaction data are critical assets that financial enterprises should explore in depth.

Customer value center: Digital transformation should be customer-centric and increase customer engagement and involvement. Technical and data infrastructure should be designed with the intention of developing scenario-based innovative services.

Sustainable improvement of digital capabilities: Digitalization is heavily dependent on an enterprise’s digital assets. This means enterprises must strive to internally improve data management, application, analysis, and identification capabilities, and treat this work as an ongoing process.

Basic ecosystem construction: An ecosystem covering an enterprise’s operation environment, data governance, and organizational structure and culture must be established. A basic ecosystem is the foundation of all the other principles.

Chinasoft International proposes these principles based on the trend for core data technologies, which are fundamental to the digitalization of the financial sector. For banks focused on risk management and banks that need to apply quantitative computing to achieve refined management, the large amount of data processed remains internal structured data.

Meanwhile, mainstream big data products in the market still use the set operation principle of structured data, which is determined by the basic data structure of computer technologies. For most industries — if there’s no disruptive breakthrough in the technical principle chain — relational databases and SQL remain the most mainstream, simple, and stable processing policies. In an enterprise-level application scenario, the data technical solution can be partially optimized, but complete replacement of the solution isn’t feasible.

Big data and AI technologies are well-suited for use in financial enterprises. Although bottom-layer technologies have an abundance of open source projects, financial enterprises increasingly rely on large platform enterprises, because these enterprises conduct superior cutting-edge research, carry out regular upgrades, and regularly perform Operations and Maintenance (O&M). The stability and sustainability of technologies developed by platform enterprises are far superior to those of non-technology-oriented enterprises, which typically employ one or two technical experts. Only large platform enterprises can carry out constant product iteration and optimization based on extensive user practices.

Chinasoft International and Huawei Empower Financial Enterprises

Huawei is a leader in digital transformation, an advocate of cloud architecture, and a major contributor to big data and AI technologies. Huawei’s comprehensive Financial Technology (FinTech) ecosystem components are rooted in its years of expertise in the financial industry, as well as unparalleled technical investment and ecosystem construction. In other words, Huawei is a leading platform enterprise that many financial enterprises choose to enable their digitalization process.

In the past two decades, Huawei has accumulated vast experience in information technology construction and development, carrying out many joint innovation projects with financial institutions to reshape platforms, data, and services. This process has involved promoting the transformation of traditional closed architecture, to open distributed architecture, with the intention of transforming the bottom-layer financial platform.

Another key aspect of those joint projects has been research and insight into big data technology, to achieve targeted marketing and real-time risk control. Meanwhile, the integration of video collaboration into current online channels helped to build an omni-channel service mode. And remote service visualization, as well as online channel integration and sharing, create a secure and consistent multi-channel service experience for users.

Chinasoft International is a major Chinese enterprise that provides software technologies and enterprise informatization services. Its service objects and solutions cover most financial institutions and management departments in China, including banking, securities, insurance, funds, trusts, Internet finance, and consumer finance. It is also an important contributor to — and leader in — informatizing and digitalizing China’s financial industry.

Specifically, Chinasoft International is a data platform and application construction technology provider, delivering end-to-end lifecycle coverage for products and services in the financial industry. It integrates Huawei’s technical ecosystem components with its own expertise in the sector, working together to achieve industry digitalization and sustainable development.

In more detail, the partnership between Chinasoft International and Huawei is built on:

An efficient data environment: The extensive experience that Chinasoft International has acquired in data warehouse and data platform construction, along with Huawei’s infrastructure products, resulted in the two organizations launching a new middle platform solution for financial data. This solution includes the industry’s data model, indicator system, as well as a comprehensive operation management and decision-making system, and the data product service and management system. Based on the characteristics of both banking services and Huawei’s products, Chinasoft International provides a secure, reliable, efficient, and comprehensive solution for the basic data service environment of banks. Combining the mature solutions of Chinasoft International’s solutions and Huawei’s products can enhance the foundation for financial enterprises’ digital transformation, helping them shift from a data warehouse to a data middle platform, and from data technology-enabled decision-making to data service-driven business development.

That process is exemplified by a large joint-stock bank that has constructed a new data environment using Huawei’s products. A stock exchange also used Huawei platform products to replace its traditional data warehouse products while upgrading its basic data platform. In all these cases, Chinasoft International helped customers conduct overall service and technical architectural planning and provided end-to-end support for solution implementation, laying a solid foundation for the customer’s digitalization strategy.

Data asset management: Data asset management is a vital task in enterprise data construction. Chinasoft International is well versed in data asset management, having developed solutions in each of the data asset management fields — covering data standards, quality, metadata, security, and master data in fields such as banking, insurance, and securities. Based on Huawei’s big data and AI platform tools, Chinasoft International can help financial enterprises streamline data asset operation and management, data standards and service specifications, and data quality and service quality. This helps enterprises implement the streamlining of scenarios, services, processes, regulations, and data. It also provides them with available, reliable, and sustainable data “fuels” for digital transformation. By combining its data asset management products with Huawei’s data platform products, Chinasoft International has developed a data middle platform solution that is equipped with good service scalability and industry adaptability. The solution has been applied to multiple financial institutions, including commercial banks, and has been well received by customers.

Targeted marketing: By capitalizing on the technologies of the two organizations, banks can effortlessly store and analyze user transaction data, similar to how Internet financial enterprises do. This helps banks accurately understand user preferences and requirements and quickly launch innovative products and mobile Internet-based financial services. The platform Huawei provides has allowed a large, well-known joint-stock bank to implement precision-marketing. Chinasoft International plays an important role in such solution architecture and implementation.

Real-time fraud prevention: Chinasoft International deploys its advanced financial service solutions on Huawei’s platform to achieve millisecond-level computing speed and the computing of thousands of complex rules. Chinasoft International guarantees zero service interruption and zero data loss, boosting the risk management ability of financial enterprises. This solution — which Huawei and Chinasoft International collaborate on — has also been applied to a next generation, real-time, intelligent anti-fraud platform of a large joint-stock bank.

International expansion: Chinasoft International has IT service delivery teams all around the world, and has implemented its cloud services, AI, and Smart City initiatives on a global scale. It has become an invaluable partner of Huawei, helping to internationalize Huawei’s products in multiple industries, including carrier, finance, entertainment, and education. For example, in Malaysia, Chinasoft International and Huawei provided digital transformation products and services to financial enterprises. They also designed and implemented a comprehensive data ecosystem construction solution for Malaysia’s Hong Leong Bank, and applied the solution in fields such as the data platform, customer identification and profiling, targeted marketing and customer operations, and risk control. They also helped the bank train a team to support its sustainable development.

Chinasoft International is a strategic partner of Huawei and a particularly valuable partner in the Huawei Kunpeng computing industry ecosystem. The two organizations have extensive, high-level cooperation in software outsourcing services, cloud solutions, and big data technologies. With its vast industrial digital experience and combined platform, operation, and ecosystem capabilities, Chinasoft International can satisfy a diverse range of customer requirements, and help drive the digitalization of the financial industry.

【Partner Testimonial】

Digital infrastructure is the driving force of digitalization. The improvement of data convergence capabilities, business service capabilities, and data asset management capabilities is critical to the digitalization of financial institutions. Chinasoft International is China’s leading provider of digital infrastructure for the financial industry. It will cooperate with Huawei to drive the digitalization and sustainable development of the financial industry.

— Chen Yuhong, Chairman and CEO of Chinasoft International