Huawei Cloud: Everything as a Service for Smart Finance

SINGAPORE, July 20, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- At the Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit 2022 held today, Huawei Cloud launched its Cloud Native Core Banking solution – the foundation for agile innovation of traditional banks and new digital banks.

At the Summit, Huawei Cloud shared three trends of digital transformation in the financial industry. First, all-cloud, meaning financial organizations migrate to the cloud, starting from peripheral systems and then core systems. Second, big data and AI convergence, which ushers in a new era of intelligent governance to leverage data as assets for maximized value. Third, all-scenario intelligent connection, where the physical and virtual worlds merge to create experience-centric, inclusive finance.

William Dong, President of Huawei Cloud Marketing, said in his keynote speech, "Currently, digital transformation is deepening across global financial institutions. This presents an era of opportunities for financial organizations to make the leap, take the lead. Finance will eventually become smart, all-scenario, and inclusive, readily accessible for everyone in diversified forms. Huawei Cloud will work with our partners to keep abreast of these three trends, and build Everything as a Service for smart finance in every scenario."

Fully Embrace the Cloud and Move Core Systems to Distributed Cloud Native

Mr. Dong pointed out that global financial institutions are leveling up their cloud strategies. The trend of cloud migration is shifting from peripheral systems to core systems. Technical architecture used to be based on dedicated mainframes and then standardized hardware, but is now evolving towards distributed cloud native.

At the summit, Huawei Cloud launched Cloud Native Core Banking solution to provide a stable cloud native platform for offloading mainframes, building new core systems for traditional banks, and powering digital banks. The solution features high availability, large-scale concurrency, and agile application iteration. A demonstration of its high availability is a disaster recovery (DR) of RPO = 0 for RTO ≤ 2 minutes. The GaussDB has an intra-city AZ RTO of less than 10s, meeting financial regulatory requirements.

Huawei Cloud's new distributed core has been successfully deployed in multiple banks. Postal Savings Bank of China has built a new-generation distributed core system on Huawei Cloud to support massive transactions, elastic scaling, and financial-grade reliability and HA. The system processes 2 billion transactions per day for its 637 million customers and 40,000 branches.

Big Data and AI Convergence

Finance is a highly digital industry that takes the lead in converging big data and AI. According to Mr. Dong, the development of data applications in this industry can be summarized into four phases: ultra-large-scale data analysis, collaborative analysis, innovation driven by data and AI, and data as assets. As data flow and transaction flexibility increase, data can be fully utilized only when treated as an enterprise asset.

To fully unlock data value, Huawei Cloud provides a big data and AI convergence platform to solve governance problems such as inconsistent analysis, lack of trustworthiness, and difficult management and usage caused by inconsistencies between lakes, warehouses, and AI platforms. Huawei Cloud provides capabilities such as unified storage and metadata, so that a copy of data can be transferred between multiple engines quickly and consistently. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) started data analysis and exploration on this convergence platform and greatly improved its efficiency, with average data query wait times reduced from 300 minutes to 1.5 minutes.

In addition, Huawei Cloud works with partners to launch smart process robots, integrating AI, robotic process automation (RPA), and low-code capabilities. Intelligent automation greatly improves the processing efficiency of frequent financial services. The credit card center of one of the top 10 banks in China used the smart process robot solution to build a smart marketing system. This system automatically explores the needs of its customers and sends them personalized financial products, content, and activity bonus for 10% more conversions.

In addition, Huawei Cloud launched the Pangu graph model, which uses groundbreaking graph network fusion to improve the accuracy of financial exception identification to 90%, spotting financial exceptions in minutes and greatly enhancing enterprise risk identification. Guangfa Securities used the Pangu Graph model to implement its financial exception identification system covering more than 4000 listed companies and 6000 bond issuance enterprises. The system handles four types of financial exceptions, more than 160 sub-type warning signals, 6 fraud motivations, and more than 10 common fraud methods. It supports multiple types of online users such as investment banks and risk control, and multiple service processes such as project review, due diligence, and supervision.

Merging the Physical and Virtual Worlds for All-Scenario Intelligent Connection

This January, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) released its Fintech Development Plan for 2022-2025, which seeks to infuse digital into financial, building a digital mindset for the whole business link, and driving innovation with technology and data. Against this backdrop, multiple banks have launched virtual human employees for customer service and image endorsement.

This year, Huawei Cloud launched the MetaStudio digital content pipeline, lowering the barriers to use virtual human services for industries. MetaStudio includes services such as virtual human generation, generating 3D avatars for users in just 5 seconds using an uploaded photo; virtual livestreamers for users to drive 3D virtual humans in real time using a single camera without professional face or motion capture devices, at a latency less than 100 ms; and virtual human video generation so users need only enter text to produce an AI-driven presentation video, which is suitable for customer service, course presentation, and news hosting.

Working with Customers and Partners to Build Smart Finance for Every Scenario

As digital transformation advances across the global financial industry, Huawei Cloud will continue the Everything as a Service strategy and work with partners to build a reliable, compliant cloud foundation for the industry.

In the Asia-Pacific region, Huawei Cloud started in 2018 and has become the fastest growing cloud among the top 5 cloud service providers in the region. Huawei Cloud has deployed 11 regions in Singapore, Thailand, and China's Hong Kong. In Q3 this year, Huawei Cloud will launch a Region in Indonesia.

Huawei Cloud builds trusted and innovative cloud services for finance customers in the Asia-Pacific. Zeng Xingyun, President of Huawei Cloud APAC, said that in terms of industry strategy, Huawei Cloud will focus on "Infrastructure as a Service, Technology as a Service, and win-win with cloud ecosystem partners" to continuously improve the core competitiveness of Huawei Cloud. In terms of market strategy, Huawei Cloud will focus on in-depth digital transformation, financial-grade security and compliance, and the best ToB services to continuously create value for customers and partners.

So far, Huawei Cloud has launched more than 220 cloud services and 210 solutions, and attracted over 38,000 partners and 3.02 million developers worldwide. Currently, Huawei Cloud and partners operate 65 availability zones in 27 geographical regions around the world, covering more than 170 countries and regions. Huawei Cloud deploys over 2800 CDN nodes to build a global content delivery network, so financial customers enjoy coverage, reliability, and scalability at the ultimate latency demanded by their business. Huawei Cloud has served the digital transformation journey of more than 300 financial customers worldwide, including banks, insurance companies, securities companies, and fintech companies. In the future, Huawei Cloud will work with customers and partners around the world to build smart finance for every scenario.