Given customers' increasing adoption of digital banking, financial institutions need to be able to handle high-frequency, real-time transactions and use data effectively to continuously deliver a good customer experience. Cloud-native technologies can help financial institutions achieve that by allowing them to scale elastically, handle peak traffic loads, support agile development, and continuously iterate and deploy new applications.
“The world is rapidly approaching a milestone of 100 billion connections, with an explosion of data at the zettabyte (ZB) level. We have officially entered the era of zettaflop (Zflop), where the power of artificial intelligence (AI) has surpassed the inflection point and is now driving transformation across various industries and services. But to thrive in the intelligent era, we must re-evaluate our approach to connections, data, applications and infrastructure, and fully embrace digital technologies to build future-oriented core competitiveness,” says Jason Cao, CEO of Global Digital Finance at Huawei.
The journey to becoming cloud-native
During the Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit 2023, William Dong, president of Huawei Cloud Marketing, shares the steps financial institutions should take to become cloud-native organisations.
Firstly, they must build a resilient infrastructure — which is stable, reliable and flexible — to modernise their operations.
Secondly, they need to modernise their apps. “Financial institutions need to be able to iterate quickly and swiftly to launch their apps, just like Internet companies,” he explains.
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Finally, they should implement a financial decision-making and analysis platform that combines data and AI. Dong adds: “This platform is key to developing personalised and intelligent services and allows financial institutions to predict and control risks more accurately.”
A container cloud for financial institutions
Huawei launched its Financial Container Cloud at the summit to help financial institutions shift to a cloud-native architecture. Underpinned by Huawei Cloud Stack, the solution can be deployed in a financial institution’s on-premises data centre.
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The Financial Container Cloud offers the following features that are crucial to financial institutions’ operations:
- High performance: It can improve system latency by 20% using Huawei’s Cloud Container Engine (CCE) Turbo, which helps accelerate computing, the connectivity and scheduling of containers. With CCE, the Agricultural Bank of China can easily cope with spikes at peak hours when there are up to 600,000 transactions per second.
- High scalability and security: It helps financial institutions overcome the challenges from network traffic peaks by supporting scale-out of up to 100,000 pods in a single cluster and expanding 10,000 pods per second. A pod is a group of containers with shared storage and network resources and a specification for how to run them. The Financial Container Cloud also provides financial-grade and multi-level security measures that help accurately detect hacking activities.
- High maintainability: Its application performance management (APM) and application operation & maintenance (AOM) functions enable financial institutions to monitor and analyse their cloud-native apps comprehensively. APM provides global tracing and analysis of application call chains, which helps financial institutions easily conduct app governance and identify performance problems. Meanwhile, AOM holistically monitors apps and infrastructure on a unified dashboard and analyses apps, instances, hosts and transactions in real time.
- Open and compatible: It is 100% compatible with Kubernetes app programming interfaces (APIs). Huawei Cloud also actively embraces open source, contributes its cloud-native technology to the open-source community, and is one of the founding members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Smarter finance with next-gen data warehouse
Since data is critical to financial institutions’ operations, Huawei also introduced the Huawei Cloud GaussDB(DWS) at the summit. The next-generation cloud data warehouse enhances serverless cloud-native capabilities, simplifies IT architecture and democratises data analytics. Dong explains: “GaussDB(DWS) offers decoupled storage, compute, and management planes, enabling multi-cluster scale-out. We have also implemented unified metadata management in the DWS (data warehouse service) based on the convergence of data lakes, warehouses and AI.”
With GaussDB(DWS), financial institutions can scale as needed while ensuring system uptime, respond to massive concurrent requests within seconds, and integrate various data sources to handle complex ad hoc queries quickly.
Benefits of GaussDB(DWS). Photo: Huawei
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Cloud-native core banking, Everything-as-a-Service
The features mentioned above are part of Huawei’s Cloud Native Core Banking platform. It provides a stable cloud-native platform for offloading mainframes, building new core systems for traditional banks, and powering digital banks. It also offers other services to help financial institutions become more agile and digital.
CodeArts, for example, empowers financial institutions to innovate faster while ensuring cybersecurity and compliance. “CodeArts is a software development assistant based on large-scale pre-training models. It helps to significantly improve software development efficiency by providing capabilities such as code generation, code inspection, and automated generation of code-testing scenarios,” says Dong.
He adds that Huawei also offers a low-code development platform that enables employees with minimal technical skills to participate in the software development process.
The Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit 2023 was held on June 7–8 in Shanghai, China. Under the theme “Navigate Change, Shaping Smart Finance TOGETHER”, the two-day summit witnessed Huawei’s key strategies announcement and strategic MOUs signing in the finance sector, along with its newly launched solutions. Industry leaders gathered and shared their insights on digital trends for the future of finance and successful cases. For more details, please click https://e.huawei.com/en/industries/finance.
