2018 Huawei Global Financial Summit held in Beijing Future digital banking will be a fully connected platform

[51CTO.com original article] On April 25, Huawei held the Huawei Global Financial Summit at the Shangri-La Hotel in Beijing with the theme of "New ICT, Stimulating New Transformation of Digital Finance". This year, it attracted more than 800 domestic and foreign financial customers and industry experts including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Singapore DBS Bank, China Life, Minsheng Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, China Merchants Bank, and China Pacific Insurance.

Huawei is the best partner for digital transformation of financial industry customers

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Ma Yue, Vice President of Huawei Enterprise BG and President of Global Sales

Ma Yue, Vice President of Huawei Enterprise BG and President of Global Sales, said in his opening speech that Huawei's global operating revenue reached RMB 603.6 billion in 2017, a year-on-year increase of 15.7%. What makes him proud is that Huawei's revenue growth in the financial industry far exceeds this figure. He revealed that Huawei's products and solutions have served more than 300 large financial institutions, including 6 of the world's top 10 banks. In addition, Huawei has also cooperated with local banks and telecom operators in 19 countries to provide financial services to more than 152 million people without bank accounts, supporting more than 35 million transactions per day.

He introduced that in Bangladesh, due to cost issues, the number of local bank branches is very limited and cannot cover the population in the suburbs. Huawei uses new ICT technologies to help them connect with local bank operators and provide ten categories of financial products and services to more than 30 million people without bank accounts.

"Through new ICT technologies, we bring digital and financial services to local individuals and families. Of course, we also recognize that an important challenge facing the transformation of financial institutions is that traditional IT architecture cannot meet business needs in an agile manner. In the past, traditional IT architecture supported financial institutions in achieving their business goals, and more importantly, ensured regulatory compliance. However, the chimney-like structure makes internal and external interconnections very complex and costly." Ma Yue said that for financial institutions, how to use new ICT technologies to activate innovation in the future and provide customers with better customized products and services at an acceptable cost will be an important issue.

Of course, many financial institutions have already started digital transformation from different perspectives:

Overseas, Huawei worked with Russian bank Sberbank, which has a strong retail and business foundation, to build an industry-leading SDN network to help the bank connect customers and employees. A bank in Brazil deployed Huawei's unified storage platform to simplify multi-layer data storage, helping them reduce management difficulty and save operating costs.

In China, China Merchants Bank and Huawei jointly built a big data platform to provide more abundant retail products and services for individual customers of China Merchants Bank. China Life Insurance cooperated with Huawei to achieve a non-differentiated network experience covering more than 3,500 outlets across the country. Minsheng Bank and Huawei signed a strategic cooperation agreement, and the two parties will focus on the innovation of intelligent financial products and services in the fields of cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things.

"All this shows that Huawei is the best partner for digital transformation of customers in the financial industry," Ma Yue concluded.

Digital transformation starts with a real business scenario

So how to complete digital transformation? Ma Yue also has his own views on this. He suggested that financial institutions should not pursue overly perfect technical solutions, but should find a real business scenario based on the need to provide better services to customers and choose a suitable partner. This partner must be willing to invest heavily in technology and innovation and be willing to cooperate with customers for a long time. Obviously, Huawei is such a partner and the best choice for customers.

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Niu Xinzhuang, General Manager of Technology and Information Department of China Minsheng Bank

Niu Xinzhuang, general manager of the Technology and Information Department of China Minsheng Bank, agrees with Ma Yue's view on gradually realizing digital transformation by starting from scenarios. He clearly stated that they will take the lead in realizing some scenario-based services at the business support layer, and at the same time hope to provide intelligent operations, customer analysis and risk management, as well as investment portfolio and business decision-making. "Ultimately, we will provide customers with an all-round and ultimate user experience."

Niu Xinzhuang also revealed that in December 2017, Minsheng Bank began to deploy a new three-year plan, the most important of which was to become a bank of technology finance. This was the first time that technology finance was included in the three-year strategic plan of the board of directors. Niu Xinzhuang believed that technology finance was imperative, and Minsheng Bank would use cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and new concepts to make an all-round and in-depth transformation of the bank.

So how do we evaluate a bank's actual technological level? In addition to looking at how technology realizes the bank's strategic value and strategic goals, Niu Xinzhuang believes that we can also start from three aspects: first, the advancement of technology, products, and operations; second, security; and third, the input-output ratio to see the actual benefits.

Huawei's views on the transformation of the financial industry were also recognized by spokespersons from several financial institutions on the spot.

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Kong Bing, Deputy General Manager of the Information Technology Department of ICBC

Kong Bing, deputy general manager of the Information Technology Department of ICBC, said that ICBC is facing many external challenges - China's economy has entered a 'new normal', financial reforms have continued to deepen, cross-border integration has deepened, and market competition has become more intense... Under such pressure, they found that new technologies have been widely infiltrated in various fields, greatly enriching and expanding people's thinking and action space, and also bringing unprecedented opportunities and challenges to commercial banks. Kong Bing told reporters that in order to further strengthen the core competitiveness of ICBC's information technology and steadily promote the construction of smart bank information systems, ICBC will further strengthen the deep integration of business and technology, continuously consolidate the foundation of technological innovation, and actively build financial cloud, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, blockchain, biometrics and other technology platforms to help the transformation and development of smart banks.

Chen Guosheng, deputy general manager of the Information Technology Department of China Life Insurance Company Limited, believes that from the perspective of the enterprise, everyone is now building an ecosystem and conducting extensive cooperation. He believes that there are several important keywords, one is respect and tolerance, the second is professional openness, and the third is mutual generation and win-win. "Ecologicalization is not about dividing the cake, but about everyone working together to make the cake bigger, so that any party participating in the ecosystem can get what they deserve and show their strengths." He revealed that China Life's core corporate culture has eight words: Become others for the sake of oneself, and achieve oneself for the sake of others, which means making oneself stronger, more capable, and able to create greater value for others. At the same time, others will identify with themselves more. "This advocates a cultural concept of everyone participating, everyone benefiting, sharing and win-win."

It is understood that China Life's current informatization construction of the entire company is actually a platform + content model. Based on a digital intelligent platform, China Life's basic capabilities and public technical capabilities are open to customers and users in combination with style scenarios to provide better services. From the head office to IT personnel at all levels of branches, they can use these capabilities in combination with scenarios to provide customers with intelligent services with better user experience. At the same time, China Life has also aggregated external resources to provide customers with better services, including intelligent voice and face recognition, deep learning, etc.

At the conference, many guests said that with the advancement of cloud computing, 5G technology, big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain and other technologies, facial recognition payment, unmanned bank branches, cross-border settlement, etc. are gradually becoming a reality within reach. In the future, financial institutions will definitely develop into a new platform for comprehensive financial information carrying and transactions, connecting all "people" and "things".

The reporter found that their remarks coincided with Huawei's views. As Ma Yue said, when digital transformation is completed, financial institutions will become a platform that connects customers and their wealth, financial statements and assets. "Ultimately, connect everything. This is our goal together." In the future, let us expect Huawei to focus on financial value integration, provide full connectivity for everything, and work with industry partners to accelerate digital transformation.

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