Thrive Digitally in a Mobile Future

2020 is set to be a tough year. With the pandemic’s unparalleled disruption across the world, all industries have been impacted. With so many people staying home, FSI companies must still provide essential services to customers. Huawei has found that many financial institutions have made good progress with digital technologies and capabilities to cope with the epidemic and its challenges.    

2019 was a tough year for Huawei, but we have stepped up to the challenges. In 2019, we added more than 300 new global FSI customers. It is evident that customers still chose Huawei as their trusted partners thanks to our competitive products and value to them, regardless of the changes in external environment.

In 2019, we built or strengthened partnerships with top banks, insurers, and securities houses in France, Italy, Singapore, Brazil, Turkey, India, and elsewhere, where we enhanced the reliability and resilience of current IT systems as well as boosted up digital capability. These typical success stories reflect the capabilities and value of Huawei products. We have become an important partner for global financial customers amid digital transformation.

Meanwhile, we are committed to building a robust ecosystem with our global partners and providing them with innovative solutions to help customers accelerate digital transformation. With the increasing demand for cashless and smart finance, Huawei is working closely with leading global partners to help banks improve digital capabilities to ensure more people can access financial services.

Building a global ecosystem is one of our core focuses, and we’ve been working very hard on it. Our goal is to build a comprehensive ecosystem and provide more services with Huawei’s fast expanding cloud services around the world. For example, in the near future, an African bank can use a Chinese or European AI partner’s outbound call service on our cloud.

In China, where banks are speeding up their digital transformation, Huawei has actively taken part in it, and has become the largest partner in China’s financial industry.

For instance, we have helped top Chinese banks complete the migration of massive amounts of data from traditional data warehouses to Huawei GaussDB platforms for better data processing and analysis, particularly needed in the mobile Internet era.

We are also working with leading banks to migrate their core credit card systems with more than 100 million customers from mainframes to an open distributed platform. Huawei provides IaaS and PaaS platforms. In addition, we take part in the construction of cloud platforms for multiple large-scale banks.

This year, the Covid-19 came out of the blue. Financial institutions around the world are striving to ensure the continuity of providing necessary services to their customers. So too is Huawei.

For us, we are customer-centric and support customers in business continuity management with our global capabilities. Huawei has the global resources to quickly respond to customers’ pressing needs to enhance digital support and ensure the normal operation of their data centers.

With most of the technical experts working from home during the pandemic, Remote PoC has emerged. To date, we have successfully completed more than 500 remote PoC with customers around the world. In our innovative set-up allows customers to do all configurations, load testing, and functional testing without leaving their homes.

Huawei and Chinese financial institutions have accumulated experience in coping with remote offices, and the closure of a large number of branches. Over the past three months, we have hosted online exchanges with more than 50 financial clients from our headquarters in Shenzhen and offices overseas to share our experiences and exchange views on Chinese and world finance.

Looking ahead, uncertainty is the biggest problem in the post-epidemic era. According to the IMF World Economic Outlook, the global economy will shrink by at least 3% in 2020, worse than during the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Our work, life, and other fields have been profoundly affected, and the “new normal” has arrived. We need to consider: What does this mean for financial institutions? How to deal with these uncertainties?

In the near term, global economic contraction will affect banks’ loan-loss reserves. Even with central bank intervention, the impact is still intense. Twitter has announced that employees may work permanently from home if they prefer, while banks have not made such radical changes.

In wealth management, banks can digitally deal with consulting and transaction services, where customers have more time to take care of their investments. As a result, wealth management has boomed. This reflects a dramatical change in clients’ behavior.

We found that that digital technology is one critical way to address the impact of the epidemic, where leading global financial institutions work their best amid digital transformation. Simply put, financial institutions with top digital measures will win in the future.

We have many exchanges online with many financial executives around the world. They believe that the capacity to work remotely and business agility are particularly critical in the new normal. Take a careful look, and we will all agree that financial institutions must move quickly enough into the digital world. E-commerce, digital payments, and super apps will be the major trends. Along with these rapid changes must come a renewed model of Business Continuity Management (BCM) for mobile office, customers’ digital journey, risk management, internal control processes, and the like.

At the same time, digital transformation should go further with the timely introduction of new technologies such as 5G and the IoT to speed up the transformation. The early adopting financial institutions will be able to turn today’s challenges into competitive advantages in the future while taking a comfortable lead in the digital world.

The digital world will run around mobility, and connectivity becomes very important, as customers will need full access to financial or non-financial scenarios anytime, anywhere. 5G is not just an innovative connection point; it drives business innovations boosting all-round customer experience. In the future, powerful real-time connections must be ubiquitous, and 5G, IoT, and flexible networks are key technologies.

We believe that mobile capacity will be the core capability of future banks. It serves not only to connect with clients, but also as an interface for internal operations and collaborations with partners. Mobile apps for banks will become a key operational platform. To support such a mobile-centric model requires new IT architectures and the key capabilities of 5G, AI, and cloud. As a leader of these technologies, Huawei is uniquely positioned to support the cloud transformation of financial institutions, build new connecting capabilities, and help financial institutions improve their agility and innovation.

Mobile apps will be the main battlefield for future banks. Digital customer acquisition will dictate mobile app traffic. Banking apps will become the core platform for digital operations and will turn into super apps combining all scenarios with ecology.

Banks will thus need to transform into mobile-centric IT architectures, including building mobile internet based on 5G technology, restructuring flexible cloud-based and distributed IT architectures, building AI-supporting data platforms, and building agile microservice architectures.

Up to now, Huawei has already served more than 1,600 financial institutions, including 45 banks of the global top 100 across more than 60 countries.

Over the past 10 years, we have gained experiences in the global financial industry. The Chinese market, in particular, allows us to get more experience with top banks amid their digital transformation and the overhaul with other tech gurus, as well as the rapid development in the mobile app era. We are more than happy to share our experience and the ecosystems with our customers and partners around the world. Together, we are heading into the mobile digital world.

Learn more about Huawei’s Intelligent Finance Solution.