In the era of "deep use of cloud", how can the banking industry make good use of cloud native + AI nirvana?
*: Light Finance Author: Shang Zhike.
From the "first year of cloud native" in 2015, to the "first year of distributed storage" in 2020, and then to the "first year of generative AI" in 2023, all practitioners sigh that the current new technological revolution has achieved unprecedented leapfrog speed. As one of the fields with the most concentrated application of new technologies, the business model, industry ecology and competitive landscape of the financial industry are undergoing earth-shaking changes. According to a 2023 financial industry survey by Nvidia, nearly half of respondents said that AI will increase annual revenue by at least 10%, and more than 1 in 3 said that AI will also help them reduce costs by at least 10% each year. When the upheaval strikes, what should financial institutions do?From business migration to the cloud, business reconstruction, and business integration into AIGC, it can be seen as the continuous evolution of the industry in terms of in-depth cloud use. "We hope to accelerate the arrival of 'fully connected, fully intelligent, and all-scenario' ubiquitous financial services through the in-depth use of cloud. Cao Chong, Vice President of Huawei and CEO of the Digital Finance Corps, pointed out at the financial sub-forum "Financial Innovation, Leading the Future with Intelligence". To this end, Huawei is deeply committed to the financial industry and continues to focus on four major directions: building infrastructure resilience, accelerating application modernization, improving digital and intelligent decision-making, and facilitating business scenario innovation, to accelerate the digitalization and intelligence of finance. On this road, Huawei is not alone, but is working with a large number of customers and partners to build the future of digital and intelligent finance.
A new era of "deep use of cloud": cloud native + AI nirvana
The concept of cloud native was first proposed by Pivotal in 2013. After migrating resources to the cloud and applications to the cloud, the financial industry has ushered in a transformation window from "business to the cloud" to "deep cloud use". "When we move towards in-depth use of the cloud, we must reshape the intelligent products, experiences and business models of finance based on cloud native and AI. Cao Chong pointed out sharply. The deep integration of cloud native and AI native has become an essential skill for financial institutions. 
The picture shows Cao Chong, vice president of Huawei and CEO of the Digital Finance Corps, which coincides with the judgment of authoritative institutions. In this regard, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology pointed out that cloud-native distributed architecture has become the general trend and direction of the transformation of the core systems of some financial institutionsAI natively empowers the era of comprehensive intelligence, from endowing scene intelligence, to fully embedding intelligence in products and solutions, and then to organizing intelligent iteration. On the one hand, cloud-native technology for financial applications has shifted from cloud-native. 0 enters the generative AI stage. Huawei believes that with the rapid development of AIGC, the entire financial service process should be redesigned in combination with the large model, and the business process will be reshaped through AIGC in terms of flexible application innovation, personalized user interaction, and efficient credit process, so as to make financial services more personalized and intelligent. On the other hand, large models have become the key winners and losers of financial digitalization. The big model could be a new watershed moment for financial institutions. To seize this wave of opportunities, it is necessary to build intelligent products and experiences, carry out business model innovation, and combine in-depth cloud use to seize the opportunity. Cao Chong said. For financial institutions, cloud-native technologies and large models are indispensable. However, financial institutions still face many challenges in how to find the optimal implementation path for their own "deep cloud". Based on the AI model, Huawei has comprehensively upgraded the four-tier architecture of digital finance from intelligent and resilient infrastructure, intelligent service engine, intelligent interaction, and ubiquitous financial services. In Cao's view, two of these dimensions are particularly important. The first is to reimagine modern applications with cloud native. In terms of agile development, Huawei combines its own soft opening platform system that has been developed and accumulated for more than 20 years, combined with the Pangu intelligent programming assistant, to improve the efficiency of soft developmentIn the new core field of distribution, a modular architecture and distributed database are used to build a core system of multi-activity resilience. Of course, this depends on the continued investment of top talent. In the database field, Huawei has deployed 2,000+ database professionals around the worldIn the financial-grade PaaS field, Huawei has gathered 1,000+ PaaS talents to continuously deploy technological innovation. Another important dimension is to reshape business processes with large models to enable the optimization of interactive experience and the intelligent leap of decision-making. Based on the Pangu model with 100 billion parameters, Huawei and its partners work together to accumulate knowledge and skills in the financial field and inject hundreds of billions of financial tokensPrecipitate 500+ subdivision scenario templates to build a basic model of financial know-how. At the same time, Huawei is exploring scenarios around large-scale models to reshape financial services and user journeys. In terms of AI for IT, the Pangu model has been successfully implemented in ICBC, and the proportion of coding assistant generation has increased to 40%.AI for Data: Build intelligent data analysis capabilities to enable everyone to use dataAI for Business, improve the efficiency and level of banking services in an all-round way. While the large model helps the financial industry to better connect with customers, it is inseparable from the exploration of new innovative businesses. To this end, Huawei has built a rich global AI talent pool, deploying 5,000+ R&D personnel, 30+ talented teenagers, and 2,000+ PhDs in 15 R&D centers around the world, helping financial institutions build digital and intelligent capabilities in an all-round way.
Distributed core upgrade, a cloud agile revolution
In the underlying facilities that support the bank's informatization, the core system is considered to be the "brain and heart" of the bank, and is also likened to an "aircraft engine". With the transformation of customer needs, the acceleration of online business, and the transformation of banking service models, it is urgent to build a new generation of core systems for banks. Judging from the actions of various banks, large banks began to plan the construction of a new generation of core systems as early as around 2010, and small and medium-sized banks began to set off a wave of construction of a new generation of core systems from 2020. However, the transformation of core systems still faces many challenges, not only the innovation of new technologies, but also the challenges of business transformation and IT transformation. Focusing on the pain points of the financial industry, at the Global Finance Summit in June this year, Huawei proposed that the "platform + service + AI" model is the key to financial business agility. Based on core capabilities such as HUAWEI CLOUD Stack, Financial PaaS, GaussDB, Pangu Model, and Lakehouse, Huawei has built industry solutions such as new distributed cores, smart data, and industrial finance to modernize applications. 
The picture shows Han Man, General Manager of the new core business of Huawei's Digital Finance CorpsHan Man, General Manager of the New Core Business of Huawei's Digital Finance Corps, pointed out that there are three keys to moving from traditional applications to modern applications. First, to better modernize applications, financial institutions can use a microservices architectureThrough enterprise modeling, combined with agile development technologies such as DevOps, we will create a financial-grade distributed cloud-native platform that supports business forever and quickly meets the needs of thousands of customers. Second, financial institutions can adopt distributed cloud-native databases to achieve efficient database transformation based on their advantages such as large capacity, strong consistency, and high performance. At present, GaussDB has helped the business systems of various banks such as large state-owned banks, joint-stock banks and regional banks to operate stably. Finally, to modernize financial applications, a resilient and solid foundation is indispensable. In the process of accelerating application modernization and achieving financial business agility, HUAWEI CLOUD serves more than 500 financial customers around the world. As we all know, the size and needs of various types of banks vary greatly, and they have extremely strict requirements for partners. So far, Huawei's solutions have been successfully implemented in various banks. Large, medium, and small banks can use Huawei to find solutions that match their needs and achieve digital and intelligent growth faster.
Where is cloud intelligence headed?Decision-making intelligence and data for everyone
In the digital transformation of commercial banks and the application of large models by financial institutions, data elements are the key driving force. "Our goal is that there is no hard data to use in finance, and that all data can create value. Cao Chong pointed out that Huawei regards data intelligence as one of its important strategic directions, and realizes the value of data through a four-step leap from operation to data, data to information, information to knowledge, and knowledge to action. At the same time, data management is moving from a traditional model to a cloud-native architecture, which will have a profound impact on the financial industry. Specifically, at the application layer, it is necessary to realize the open sharing of data on the cloudAt the capability layer, on-demand empowerment of data services on the cloud is realizedAt the base layer, the efficient flow of database and lakehouse data is realized. For these three layers,Huawei has built a three-layer architecture of cloud-native digital intelligence convergence. In terms of digital intelligence applications, we will build marketing, risk control, and operation capabilities to fully release the value of dataIn terms of data and AI, we will improve the efficiency of data development, support on-demand use, and promote rapid optimization of large models and agile data usageIn terms of cloud infrastructure, the data platform has moved from offline to real-time, achieving second-level response. At present, Huawei's data intelligence solution has served more than 100+ financial institutions around the world, implementing data for everyone and intelligence everywhere to ensure that customers can use the cloud well and use it well. In this regard, a major bank has cooperated with Huawei to establish a data platform and an artificial intelligence laboratory to promote technological innovation and data elements, enhance the value of data-driven, and build a large model of the financial industry to enable applications in multiple scenarios. It is the consensus of many banks to work with more partners to actively carry out research and development of key core technologies, so as to provide stronger support for business transformation and development. Huawei has served more than 3,300 financial customers around the world, including 53 of the world's top 100 banks, and the number continues to grow. A hundred flowers bloom is spring. From these solutions and cases, we can see Huawei's speed and depth of industry layout. After building the strongest competitiveness for the future of digital and intelligent finance, Huawei and financial institutions will go further on the road of building the future of digital and intelligent finance, and help more financial institutions to run "acceleration".