MWC24: Non-stop Banking: How Resilience Boosts Intelligence

Resilience must be redefined to boost intelligence

In the past year, Huawei has made continuous progress in the global finance industry. We have taken a deep dive into four directions:

• building resilient infrastructure
• accelerating application modernization
• enhancing data-driven decisions
• enabling business scenario innovation

We have worked closely with our customers and partners to accelerate the digitalization and intelligence of finance. To date, Huawei has served over 3,300 financial customers in more than 60 countries and regions, including 53 of the world's top 100 banks.

In this post, I will focus on infrastructure resilience, because resilience is the foundation for everything.

In the digital world, digital financial services represented by real-time payments are booming. Technologies go for open architecture and cloud. Generative AI is growing rapidly in key areas such as financial engagement and software development.

All of these changes pose new challenges to resilience. We must redefine and consolidate resilience to better accelerate intelligence.

"4 Zeros" redefine resilience

I believe "Bank 4 Zeros" is the way to redefine resilience.

We must ensure zero downtime and high availability of financial services, deliver a zero-wait user experience, and achieve zero-touch operations while ensuring zero-trust service and data security.

"Bank 4 Zeros" are crucial for building comprehensive resilience in the digital era. They are paving the way for "Non-Stop Banking".

1. Zero downtime

Real-time payments have increased the number of concurrent transactions from thousands to tens of thousands of TPS. The traditional architecture can no longer support zero RPO.

MAS allows for remarkable business continuity, with databases determining SLAs

Huawei provides a multi-active MAS architecture, which is crucial for achieving the five nines (99.999) in SLAs.

MAS architecture has three key capabilities: a cell-based application platform, distributed databases, and highly available cloud-native infrastructure. Distributed databases, in particular, are the decisive factor for SLAs. Today I want to introduce you a new powerful database GaussDB.

GaussDB: A better choice for ensuring zero downtime

In the past, there were few choices in the transactional database field, and traditional databases could not support the financial industry's move towards MAS.

• high availability
• high security
• high performance
• high intelligence
• high elasticity
• easy deployment
• easy migration 

PSBC Builds the largest cloud native core with GaussDB

Postal Savings Bank of China has 650 million retail users who used to run in the traditional centralized core architecture which was not easy to support the new business development.

In 2020, PSBC built a new core with our MAS architecture and GaussDB, and developed 5000 "LEGO style" service components to achieve cell-based deployment.

Since the system went live in April 2022, GaussDB has supported over 2 billion peak daily transactions of PSBC, making it the world's largest cloud-native core development practice.

Huawei All-Flash Storage enables always-on services

Storage is another core component for achieving high availability. Huawei Storage is growing rapidly, and we emerged as one of the world's top two storage providers in 2023.

How is our storage growing so fast? Because of our industry-leading full-redundancy architecture and unified active-active SAN and NAS.

Another key task for us is to exploit the advantages of multi-technology collaboration, which means making storage work more efficiently with databases, containers, and network optical connectivity to further reduce RTO.

Currently, Huawei's all-flash storage has supported more than 1000 PB data storage for global financial customers and enhanced zero downtime for them.

2. Zero Touch

As we move to cloud and AI, networks and operation are becoming extremely complex, which is a big challenge for us.

Autonomy: The way to intelligent operations

Recently, an autonomous driving car powered by Huawei technologies, M9, has made a splash in China. It can dodge 100% obstacles automatically. It also prevents human errors in driving. Drivers can relax without holding the steering wheel all the time. We have applied the same concept to the network operation and management. Autonomy is the way to intelligent operation.

Digital Map: From autonomous to intelligent operations

Huawei Autonomous Driving Network has been enhanced from 1-3-5 to 0-1-3-5 ("0" means "0 Human Errors"), helping finance adopt Zero Touch operations.

Digital Map is the most important capability, which was upgraded based on Cloud-Map Algorithms and Digital Twins. It leverages large AI models to visualize correlations and changes to networks, traffic, and applications in real time. The result is a network digital twin simulation, which ensures zero change errors.

In a joint innovation between Huawei and a top bank, Digital Map achieved 88% faster troubleshooting and one-click simulation of application changes. It also enables 100% network configuration change accuracy, and touch time is reduced by 90%.

3. Zero Trust

As digitalization expands, so do the vulnerabilities of every data point and network connection. They face constant threats and attacks from various sources. In 2023, the number of cyber attacks on global banks increased by 520%, and the average service recovery time of financial institutions after ransomware attacks was 16.3 days.

Building multi-layer in-depth defense to ensure service and data security

Virus attacks cannot be completely prevented. Attack versus defense is a race against time, so speed is critical.

Huawei keeps improving its fast attack detection, virus isolation, and data recovery capabilities. We have provided the industry's first multi-layer anti-ransomware solution that uses firewalls for detection and storage air-gap to isolate viruses in seconds to prevent intructions.

Huawei built data security solutions for more than 40 top banks in 2023, protecting more than 100 PB of core production data.

4. Zero Wait

Zero Wait is the ultimate customer experience. And for banks, real-time capabilities are critical to the customer experience in the digital era.

For example, when an employee receives their salary, they immediately get a recommendation for wealth management. Similarly, when an employee transfers money out, they immediately get a recommendation for a micro loan.

Using transaction data in real time for analysis and decisions is all about the real-time data capability.

Huawei Data Intelligence Solution makes every engagement real-time

At MWC, I announced that the Huawei Data Intelligence Solution is going global. This solution combines an all-serverless architecture with data lakehouse and data-AI convergence. It provides extremely strong real-time capabilities, especially data warehouse.

Two thirds of China's top 20 banks chose Huawei DWS to build leading data platforms. For example, in China a top bank that built the largest cloud data warehouse in Asia can store tens of millions data records in seconds, and query them in milliseconds. And, recently, Thailand's top credit card issuer chose Huawei DWS to speed up transition from traditional marketing to real-time interactive marketing.

Huawei's Data Intelligence Solution makes every engagement real-time and is the ideal choice to build a zero-wait experience.

Non-Stop banking: Resilience boosts intelligence

In an uncertain digital world, it's so important to reshape resilience, wherever you are and whether you're a big or small bank.

Resilience boosts intelligence. In the digital world, all changes pose new challenges to resilience. We must redefine and consolidate resilience to better achieve non-stop banking: ensure zero downtime and high availability of financial services, deliver a zero-wait user experience, achieve zero-touch operation while ensuring zero-trust service and data security, and eventually accelerate the development of intelligence.

Learn more about Huawei's Intelligent Finance solutions. 

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.