Global digital transformation investments are expected to reach US$1.8 trillion in 2022 (https://bit.ly/3WuEVPC), and financial institutions are under immense pressure to digitally transform so they can anticipate and prepare for the next new normal.

At the same time, they are also expected to address new business needs: improving efficiency and sustainability, complying with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and financial requirements, and enabling security and data convergence with real-time intelligence for improved customer experience to name a few. In this radically evolving environment, embracing innovation to scale is key.

During the Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit 2022, Jason Cao, Chief Executive Officer of Huawei Global Digital Finance, shared his thoughts on how stakeholders of the industry can shape smarter and greener finance together.

“Technology continues to drive the development of the financial industry, especially in connectivity and intelligence. We’ve seen how the ATM broke the time limit and mobile banking broke the space limit. Now, super apps are reshaping customer engagement,” said Cao.

Financial institutions are entering a new era, with new services and products emerging one after another. According to Cao in his address to key industrial players in Singapore, these ultimately present as many challenges as there are opportunities.

What is smarter and greener finance?

Smarter and greener finance enables connections with intelligence for all scenario services to capture opportunities and meet these challenges.

With fully connected and fully intelligent connections optimising agile and flexible customer engagement solutions for improved digital experience, smarter and greener finance delivers three key capabilities:

Data, intelligence, and scenario integration

An intelligent converged platform builds real-time data capabilities based on a hybrid multi-cloud architecture, making cross-cloud management easier with agile services to meet the requirements for different scenarios.

Although hybrid multi-cloud architecture is trending, there are technical challenges such as multi-cloud one-network collaboration and multi-party data encryption and computation. But according to Cao, new technologies can make modernisation a reality with a distributed cloud microservice platform to support a seamless re-architecture and migration experience.

All-scenario digital end-user experiences

Having low-code capabilities go a long way to aid in the development of native super apps and a customer engagement centre (CEC) that connects customers with digital services for better end-user services. Huawei has collaborated with partners to build an all-scenario intelligent financial solution to integrate data, intelligence, and scenarios for an improved customer experience in scene interaction, perception, and decision-making.

“From the intelligence perspective, we are experiencing the era of intelligent decision-making. 2022 is a milestone for intelligence. We have officially entered ZFLOPS times with the development of intelligence an era of super-personalisation, and we have to think about what that means for us. We see smart contracts that will make decision-making possible everywhere,” Cao added.

Platform + service architecture with integrated agility, intelligence, and scenarios

Cloud-native strategies and technologies enable the acceleration of intelligent convergence for an agile digital platform, along with aggregating Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products for an open ecosystem across all scenarios within financial services.

These have the potential to become more environmentally sustainable with a green and autonomous cloud infrastructure and facilities in place. Financial institutions can improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon footprint and at the same time, facilitate the collaboration of multi-technology, heterogeneous technology, and hybrid multi-cloud.

Global partnerships for diversified solutions

Huawei has been building innovative solutions with leading partners to support customers’ digital needs, one of which is the Digital Banking 2.0 Solution which leverages Temenos’ open platform. This is designed to support the rapid launch of digital banks, empowering banks to accelerate modernisation in the cloud and improving the rollout efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Last year, Huawei launched the Financial Partner Go Global Program (FPGGP) (https://bit.ly/3SX1RUF) to build a global ecological platform that effectively connects customers’ needs and partners’ innovative solutions.

“It was a successful program with 25 partners joining FPGGP. Furthermore, our joint solution with Netis Alops was launched in Singapore and since then, created greater opportunities in over 10 countries,” said Cao.

When asked about Huawei’s technology roadmap, Cao shared about the upcoming launch of FPGGP 2.0.

“We hope to have consulting partners and global service partners on board. We’re also looking to develop local partners in key countries as a local integrator for FPGGP joint solutions, to better sell these solutions in the local market,” explained Cao.

Huawei is a key player in digital transformation for the global financial services industry, serving more than 2,000 financial customers in over 60 countries and regions, including 49 of the world’s top 100 banks.

Find out more about smarter and greener finance with Huawei here (https://bit.ly/3sSQwuv).