He: Concentrating on core competencies
As part of its expansion into IT services and the financial services markets, Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has partnered with 11 banking IT solution providers to establish an open platform ecosystem for the finance industry, reports Banking Technology.
The collaboration was announced during Huawei’s Global Financial Services Industry Summit in Beijing last week. The launch partners are Accenture (China), Beijing Advanced Digital Technology, Beijing Yucheng Technologies, Beiming Software, DHC Software, Deloitte Business Advisory Services, Digital China System Integration Service, First Data, Infosys Technologies, Micro Focus, and Worldline Technologies.
David He, president of marketing and solution sales at Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group, that that Huawei will focus on its core skills as a hardware platform provider, based around its BDII – Business-Driven ICT Infrastructure – approach.
“The new ecosystem is designed to address the IT transformation needs of financial organisations [and] promotes BDII within the financial industry by enabling our partners to focus on their core competencies,” said He. “For example, consulting firms, application vendors, and system integrators will be able to leverage their in-depth understanding and practical experience around industry applications, while Huawei, as a hardware platform provider, will focus on ICT infrastructure.”
Collaboration was one of the main themes of the event. During a keynote presentation, He said that collaboration and joint innovation between banks and vendors is essential to overcome the challenges faced by the financial services industry as it faces the dual threat of new digital and mobile technologies being harnessed by new, agile competitors.
The company also jointly published a white paper, Transformation and Reconstruction of Banks in the Digital Era, with Deloitte. In it, the two companies highlighted the need for banks to implement a digitalisation strategy supplemented by powerful and supportive systems, and IT capability construction.
The white paper argues a key component of the strategy is the transformation of cloud architecture, which enables banks to improve analysis efficiency, lower the cost of operations and innovation, and enhance data storage and disaster preparedness capabilities. In addition, big data strategies enable banks to quickly respond to real-time customer demands by analysing massive volumes of customer data. The transformation from multi-channel to omni-channel systems will also help banks provide consistent and seamless customer experiences.
By launching the open platform ecosystem for the finance industry, Huawei and its partners hope to help financial institutions migrate from closed to open IT architectures and enable enhanced customer experience and convenient service innovations in a safe and reliable operating environment.
As part of the collaboration, Huawei is working with other members of the ecosystem to launch a range of open platform-based solutions for the finance industry, including an online banking cloud (based on private cloud architecture for finance), a credit loan cloud, a direct banking cloud, a micro-and-small-loan service cloud, a core account cloud, a credit card core application cloud, as well as mobile teller and home banking capabilities. These solutions have helped companies including the Spanish Bolsas y Mercados Españoles exchange build a cloud-based equity trading system.
“Huawei facilitates IT architecture transformation within the finance industry by providing highly reliable x86 cluster systems to support core transaction systems, in addition to cloud architecture for finance that supports the transformation of the business and processes of banks,” said Wang Hongfeng, general manager, finance solutions, in Huawei’s EBG.. “Huawei also provides platform resources support through our open labs, innovation centres, authentication centres, and secondary development and remote support. Through cross-practice cooperation, Huawei hopes to speed up the evolution toward open platform architecture in the financial services industry.”