Huawei unveils four strategic directions for the future of finance

Finance is poised to undergo a transformation, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) steps in to make real-time decisions using vast data sets. This vision was outlined by Jason Cao, CEO of Global Digital Finance at Huawei, during Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit 2023.

Mr. Cao highlighted that globally, there will soon be 100 billion connections, and with those, an explosion of data to the zettabyte level.

He also noted that compute power is now entering the zettaflop era to power AI as it passes the inflection point of driving transformation across a spectrum of industries and services.

But to thrive in the “intelligence era”, Mr Cao said financial institutions need to reconsider their entire digital strategy, encompassing their approach to connections, data, applications, and infrastructure, in order to strengthen their core competitiveness.

As an example, Mr Cao cited how some companies are already demonstrating that IT development can be done with 90% fewer human developers.

No industry generates as much actionable data as the finance industry, and as AI enters the mainstream, user behaviour and corporate production and service models will all need to quickly adapt.

Resilient infrastructure is the key to delivering on the promise of real-time transformation of data into decisions, Mr. Cao said.

Building resilient infrastructure: the key to cloud-native, real-time decision-making

The base foundation of Huawei’s approach to providing resilient infrastructure is its “M.E.G.A.” model – an acronym for Multi-DC-As-A-Computer, E2E Experience, Green, and Autonomous.

This model treats entire data centres as computers. “We use the peer-to-peer computing of CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs to enable the multi-active data center to run efficiently, just like a computer,” Mr. Cao told the conference. 

The model ensures user experience, service resilience, and service security, helping institutions move from host architecture to containerised applications and eventually, to hybrid multi-cloud.

Accelerating application modernisation: towards personalized financial services

The goal of the financial industry is to move away from “one-size-fits-all” products and instead deliver highly tailored products matched to customers’ individual circumstances.

Institutions need to modernize their applications, a process Huawei accelerates through a “platform + service” model which places many microservices onto a stable, high-performance infrastructure.

Mr. Cao emphasized the role of high and low code technologies to take advantage of these microservices in “composable service delivery”, which enables the rapid development of tailored products and services.

Huawei supported CITIC Bank’s moves towards new retail by modernising more than 160 applications and optimising the full-link architecture based on technologies such as containerized pass-through networks. The distributed architecture now outperforms the original core host platform, notably with lower latency.

Enhancing data-driven decisions: turning information into insight

Financial institutions are repositories of vast amounts of data, increasing by over 30% every year. Extracting actionable insights from this deluge of data is vital, Mr Cao said.

Huawei has a four-step process to maximise data value — transforming operations into data, data into information, information into knowledge, and finally, knowledge into action.

AI plays a pivotal role in this process, acting as the catalyst for efficient decision-making.

Achieving this requires a comprehensive upgrade across five dimensions of data intelligence — data architecture, data governance, data consumption, data security, and data talent.

Mr. Cao noted the specific problem of unstructured data. “A lot of unstructured data of financial institutions is not effectively used. Numerous PB-level audio, video, and bills had been stored in the past. We can now use generation AI technology to generate new value for these silent unstructured data.”

Huawei’s new Data Intelligence Solution 3.0 solution provides an across-the-board upgrade on cloud native data architecture, data governance, technology-enabled services, and more.

Based on the real-time data lakehouse, it responds to data requirements within seconds. It also builds distributed cluster computing power to support large models with hundreds of billions of parameters and efficient training of TB-level data and further streamlines data and AI workflows for one-stop data development and modelling, reducing the model development period from months to weeks.

Enabling scenario innovation: Device-Edge-Cloud-AI Industrial Financial Platform

Enabling scenario innovation is a high priority for the financial sector to provide highly personalised products and services for customers’ specific circumstances.

Huawei enables this by providing a Device-Edge-Cloud-AI Industrial Financial Platform, combining a variety of technologies, designed to ensure trusted supervision, credible ownership, and trusted value.

Mr. Cao said Huawei was committed to advancing cutting-edge technologies and exploring new scenarios, while at the same time collaborating with customers and partners to build fully-connected, fully-intelligent, and all-scenario digital finance.

“By navigating changes with agility and innovation, we aim to enhance digital productivity and create a brighter future together,” Mr Cao said.

Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit 2023 was held June 7-8 in Shanghai, China. The theme of the summit was “Navigate Change, Shaping Smart Finance TOGETHER”. The event saw key strategy announcements from Huawei, the signing of strategic MOUs, and the launch of innovative solutions. For more details about the event, please visit https://e.huawei.com/en/industries/finance.