Connecting People With Finance: Empowering the Financial Industry in the Intelligent Mobile Era
by Cao Chong, President of Global Financial Services Business, Huawei Enterprise BG September 29, 2020In the intelligent mobile era, Huawei — with its vision, insights, solutions, ecosystems, and experts — is uniquely positioned to create new value. The global outbreak of COVID- 19 has disrupted the lives and businesses of countless people, and the transformation to digital business models poses huge challenges to every industry.
The Financial Industry Enters a New Era
The COVID-19 outbreak has impacted countless people globally, leading us into a new era, where vertical industries evolve fast to respond with new business models.
Cao Chong
Digital banks are one of those, which emerge with the highly wanted contactless services, allowing customers to access to financial services safely from home. They excel by quickly rebuilding service processes, upgrading their operation models, and providing customers with tailored services.
These enterprises started digital transformation with customers, gradually to employees, branches, and then the organisations themselves. Refreshed paradigms with new operational designs ultimately drives the industry into an intelligent era.
Accelerating the Digital Transformation
Meanwhile, the financial industry can take certain measures to overcome future business challenges.
Redesign the customer service journey: With branches closed and pressing needs of contactless services amid the pandemic, banks have begun to turn to mobile banking. Financial Technologies (FinTech) can be used to open more services online, enhancing customer experience through the overhauled journey.
Business agility and mobility: Mobile-first strategy comes into many enterprises’ strategies, specifically incorporated into their organizational principles and key targets, fundamentally transforming systems, processes and culture. Financial institutions will need tech experts who are agile and visionary as partners.
Smart branches: Bank branches are increasingly intelligent and mobile, and capable to identifying customers, measuring temperatures (in case of the pandemic), and guiding services.
Digital payment: Mobile payment has become essential, with its usage up by 60 percent in the first quarter of 2020 in some Asia-Pacific markets. Banks thus need to improve their capabilities on mobile payment services and seamlessly merge them with existing banking services for better experience for, in particular, Internet savvy customers.
Digital customer acquisition and operations: Financial institutions will get many new customers online, so they need to strengthen the capabilities such as Electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) to better mitigate risks and precisely deliver customer services.
Customer communication: Online services will no longer limited by time. Banks will need an interactive platform that offers direct communication with customers, serve them in anytime, anywhere.
Cloud architecture: Hybrid cloud is a foundation rather than just a trend. The always-on property and scalability helps financial institutions to better utilize their resources, such as quickly running Internet-native services and products in a collaborative development mode, which shortens the Time-to-market (TTM) of ideas.
5G+ trend: Ultra-broadband supported by 5G broadens the variety of applications – especially the data-thirsty ones – from text and voice services to video, Virtual Reality (VR), and Augmented Reality (AR). Moreover, 5G’s low latency and high reliability enable banks to connect with a billion individual and enterprise customers with quality services of wider varieties.
Huawei’s Vision and Solution for the Financial Industry
Huawei has served over 1,600 financial customers in more than 60 countries, including 45 of the world’s top 100 banks. To successfully implement both mobile-first and digital transformation strategies, the industry needs to focus on three aspects: connectivity, digitalization, and business agility.
Connectivity: Ubiquitous connectivity is the core of mobility and digitalization. Fast, reliable, and quality network connections are the cornerstone for successful online services.
Digitalization: Efficiency can only be maximized when financial services and operations shift from traditional to Internet-native and digital.
Business agility: The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted millions of people around the world. Financial institutions must respond more rapidly to changes via digital technologies to adjust their business models and measures for risk control.
Huawei can help customers in the financial industry equip with full connectivity, digitalization, and business agility. With ample options of products and solutions, and supported by a global ecosystem, Huawei has launched “ABCDE” for financial customers.
Finance Cloud Architecture: Financial transformation works best on new architecture. Huawei offers more than just hybrid cloud, data centres, and service cloudification, but also service continuity and High Availability (HA) disaster recovery, internal networks based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN), as well as storage systems based on dual-active and all-flash technologies.
Huawei, along with the Bank of China (BOC) is building a hybrid cloud-based financial ecosystem supporting one billion users and 100,000 transactions per second. In Singapore, DBS Bank uses Huawei’s full-lifecycle intelligent storage solution to enhance its service data storage and access efficiency.
Smart Branch and Services: Future bank branches are set to provide high-end, convenient, and comprehensive financial service experience for customers. All these can be achieved with Huawei’s solutions in intelligent marketing, connection, management, and security protection solutions for bank branches.
China Merchants Bank is an example, whose customers can reserve services ahead of time through the bank’s app so that the branch can prepare the required resources in advance, all supported by a series of smart applications.
Digital Core: The digital core must be built based on open and distributed technologies, supporting new generation applications for faster customer acquisition, better customer experience, and lower costs. This core must support the bank’s reconstruction of data planes with the next generation data platform.
World-leading banks such as Sunline Technology, Forms Syntron, and Temenos are among Huawei’s partners to develop a digital core solution for various scenarios of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The solution supports modular deployment of the core systems of open banks, with the capabilities to further develop into a “super app” for more services.
New Data Platform: New data platforms are urgently needed over the traditional ones, considering data a core asset. Through partnership, Huawei has built such solution that helps financial institutions acquire customers, control risks in real-time, and reshape operation capabilities end-to-end.
The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), which has 500 million customers, has managed more than 2 PB of data in the theme data marts over the past three years. They now run on a new data warehouse platform, with enhanced scalability and system performance. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is lower, and customer experience is better.
Open Ecosystem: Huawei has more than 200 solution partners worldwide, with solutions ranging from bank cores, AI chatbots, and intelligent networks to mobile office apps, business intelligence, and intelligent data pools.
Successful cases are all around the world, such as the deployment of new distributed core systems for many financial institutions in China. In Africa, a Kenyan leading bank runs an inclusive financial credit platform. Another new digital core system was also deployed for some regional banks in Southeast Asia, including a payment ecosystem with banks for card-less users in Indonesia.
In the future, 5G, AI, and cloud will vastly impact the financial service industry. Digital transformation in the sector was deeply discussed in this year’s HUAWEI CONNECT between September 23 and 26 in Shanghai, as we are dedicated in supporting our partners on the unique digital transformation journey.
