Advancements in technology and the finance system present a key moment where financial institutions can reshape resilience, reshape agility, and reshape intelligence. These three factors are key to facing future uncertainties and facilitating the transformation of the financial industry.

The Huawei HiFS Frontier Forum 2024 focused on how continuous technological innovation and ecosystem cooperation accelerate the digital and intelligent transformation of the financial industry. Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Digital Finance BU delivered a keynote speech at the forum that outlined the key steps that Huawei and its financial partners would be taking in the near future to realize a financial system with better resilience, intelligence, and agility. Also at the forum, Kunte Chen, Chief Digital Transformation Officer of Huawei Digital Finance BU, proposed suggestions for banks in the cloud and AI era. These suggestions focus on ensuring stability and reliability of operations and a future view of the need to develop data infrastructure to create value for customers. It’s worth taking a deeper look into these visions of the future of the financial industry.

To understand how to reshape finance, it's important to understand that the finance industry is experiencing four concurrent development stages. These are:

• Late State Informatization
• Mature State Mobility
• The Growth State of the Ecosystem
• The Exploration Stage of Intelligence

These four development stages also coincide with new and old challenges that the global financial industry will face, such as technical debts. One initiative that Huawei announced during the 2024 HiFS Frontier Forum is the launch of the Financial Partner Go Global Program (FPGGP). This acceleration program allows Huawei to work with more partners across the industry and work together to focus on key scenarios within digital transformation in the global financial industry, building a global ecosystem for the digital finance industry. The FPGGP program is the culmination of years of knowledge from program participants and will be key to increasing their capacity to innovate. The program will aim to improve every part of the lifecycle of the financial industry, from consultation to solution and services.

In his keynote speech, Jason Cao expressed excitement that these partnerships have enabled Huawei to “develop innovative scenario-based solutions in eight mainstream industry scenarios, from infrastructure O&M to application system platforms, from core business transactions to big data applications, and from banking to insurance and securities.”

A major factor in reshaping intelligence are the recent innovations in artificial intelligence. AI assistants have been part of baking for some time and will continue to improve as the industry shifts towards AI Banks. Huawei has done key work in unlocking the potential of large AI models by implementing AI in over 20 scenarios, such as AI4Data, AI4Business, and AI4IT. Huawei aims to use high quality data with over 100 worldwide financial institutions already using Huawei’s data intelligence solution.

While robust data solutions are one part of the puzzle, it’s important to understand that even more considerations go into reshaping agility. Recent and future technological innovations in cloud services mean that financial institutions can pivot to a “platform + service” mode where they can attract new customers and retain existing ones through excellent service and diligence. The beauty of a public cloud model is that both traditional and digital banks can achieve business agility in different ways. Traditional banks can utilize on-premise cloud native transformation while digital banks can leverage the public cloud to rapidly develop new products and services. Huawei offers a hierarchical solution that can help financial solution achieve agility no matter where they are in the flow of new tech adoption.

This hierarchical solution consists of a bottom layer, which is a solid hybrid multi-cloud foundation. The second layer includes a high-performance Cloud Container Engine (CCE), the distributed database GaussDB, and CodeArts that propels software development. The top layer is key to facilitating the modernization of applications and these are the N dimensional professional services that Huawei provides, including planning, platform construction, application integration, and O&M.

Finally, it’s important to examine the role of resilience in order to keep financial services online and ubiquitous. Huawei has crafted a “four Zeros” framework that covers four major factors that must be tackled in order to reshape resilience. The four Zeros are:

• Zero Downtime - Ensuring that thousands of transactions per second can occur without the system failing.
• Zero Trust - Utilizing cutting edge security to combat the growing risk of cyber attacks on financial institutes.
• Zero Touch - Implementing autonomous networks powered by AI which means a reduction in change errors and better decision making.
• Zero Wait - Building a data architecture that uses cloud-native infrastructure to ensure agile services that are constantly being updated and giving customers the fastest high quality service.

These are just the basic building blocks needed to reshape resilience, agility, and intelligence. These are complex problems that require constant vigilance and innovation. However, together these building blocks can help reshape the financial sector, and create a system that is capable of making the lives of customers all over the world better. Huawei is on the cutting edge of many of the solutions that will reshape intelligence, and Jason Cao puts it best when he addressed the Frontier Forum 2024 and outlined his desire to “work together to make resilience and intelligence happen.”

Click here to learn more about Huawei’s intelligent finance solutions.