Huawei Co-Host Africa Digital Banking Summit with ICSA
Huawei has joined league of digitally savvy financial services experts to share insight at the 2nd annual digital banking summit as official co-host with International Centre for Strategic Alliance.
The summit which is expected to hold virtually will commence on November 11, 2020.
As financial technology services provider, Huawei stated that when you look at the banks customers’ behaviour compared with several years ago, it has become totally different.
On the one hand, more and more Internet giants or Fintech companies provide banking services and change customers’ behavior dramatically.
On the other hand, the new normal of the epidemic which promotes all service online especially for banking services, has highly accelerates banking digitalization.
The financial industry is undergoing huge changes.
More and more banks are focusing on mobile platforms which aims to provide services online anytime, anywhere.
Financial institutions are also building platforms and ecosystems to embed financial services into people’s daily life.
This greatly expands the interaction between financial institutions and customers, and also create more business and service model.
Let’s look at something happening in the banking industry in the Sub-Saharan African (SSA) region, basically, there are three very key trends.
The first trend is cost reduction.
Given the pressure of operation, most of the banks want to reduce their cost, one of the actions is shutting down the number of physical branches, based on the statistic of the annual report.
Some banks reduce the number of physical branches 10% year by year.
The second trend is that more and more players like telecom operators joining the banking service market.
Of course, this gives pressure on the banking industry. But at the same time, this also gives huge opportunities to the banks.
The third trend is that the banks are building their own digital channels like online banking and mobile banking.
Based on statistics, the transactions from digital channels are almost doubled year by year.
Although almost all the banks are talking about digital transformation, it’s clear that different banks have different actions.
Some banks focus on the retail business, some focus on the mobile-first.
Some focus on open banking etc. but basically, the banks want to provide agile and security services to the customers, improve service delivery.
Based on Huawei’s practice, our solutions are divided into 5 areas.
The first solution is Mobile service which helps the banks to build the mobile channel and services.
The second solution is new core banking which deals with the bombing of users and provides instant services like small savings and loans for the customers.
The third solution is the smart branch, the fourth solution is new infrastructure architecture to enable the new innovative businesses.
The last solution is a new data lake platform.
Of course for these solutions, some of them are capabilities from Huawei and our partners, and actually, this is our strategy we call it platform plus the ecosystem.
Because of Huawei, we are really good at technology and platform. And our partners are really good at applications.
So this is why we combined together to deliver end to end solutions to our customers because we want our customers focusing much more on their business instead of complicated technology.
The first solution is Mobile Service, this solution is dedicated to providing mobile financial services. With enabling banks to provide innovative for banked and underbanked customers.
The basic function is a mobile wallet that can enable cash in, cash out, or money transfer, top-up, etc. and based on the function there are some other functions like mobile payment and mobile finance.
For mobile payment which can enable payment through NFC or QR code scanning.
For mobile finance which can provide banking services like an overdraft, micro saving, and microloan, as well as service from 3rd parties like insurance or other industry.
The next solution is a new core banking system solution. Huawei’s New Core Banking solution is dedicated to helping banks on the implementation of digital transformation. And based on our practice, we believe the banking industry is building so called bi-modal architecture.
The first modal is traditional core architecture which is close, traditional and it’s really hard for Capacity, Scalability, and the cost is very high.
The second modal is the new digital core architecture which based on open technology like X86 and Distributed architecture, Cloud to enable High scalability, Agile, and most importantly, the cost very effective.
It’s clear that for the bimodal architecture, the system located in the traditional architecture will be migrated to the new architecture step by step.
For this region, we’ve already have many practices, like we help one of the top banks for one country to build their digital platform based on open and cloud technology.
The first step of the project is building a small saving and loan platform, the second step is building a digital payment and ecosystem platform to roll out the region.
The next solution is smart branches. If you look at what’s happening on physical branches.
It’s interesting that on one hand, the banks want to shut down the number of branches.
But on the other hand, the banks want to make some of the branches much smarter to improve customer experience and customer journey by leveraging cutting-edge technology like 5G, Wifi6 and AI technology like AR and VR.
Based on Huawei Smart Branch’s solution and practices. We would like to highlight 4 areas for this solution.
The first point is intelligent management, one example is that we have an integrated data center solution for the server room of the branches to enable resource deployment and management remotely.
The second point is intelligent marketing, one example is that when a customer coming inside into the physical branch, the back end system can identify whether this is a VIP user or not and then give the suitable product promotion.
The third point is intelligent links like Wifi6 and the last one is intelligent security which can make your environment much more safety.
The next solution is new infrastructure architecture and actually, it is about the cloud platform.
Based on the practice, the very interesting part is that when the banks go to the cloud. Their strategy is a multi-cloud for example the banks they want to go to the private plus public cloud.
Huawei’s cloud strategy is hybrid cloud, which means Huawei can provide both on premise and public cloud.
Actually, our cloud platform is based on open technology. So that is much easier for us to connect our cloud and 3rd parties’ cloud as well to meet multi cloud strategy of our customers.
Another key point that I want to highlight here is that most of the banks have multi physical datacenters.
But traditionally. Some of the physical datacenters take an active role and the others take the DR role. The new trend is that all of the datacenters are taking Active-Active roles. Huawei also has many practices on that.
Actually, when we talk about Cloud, it’s also a very board topic and there are many components and products inside cloud-like IT products.
Huawei is Industry Leading IT Products provider and all of our products are ranked top3 globally by 3rd party.
For example, our server is ranked No.3 and our storage is ranked No.1 growth globally. We have already more than 4,300 Private cloud customers and more than 1,000 Big Data customers.
Our IT Infrastructure products keep Sustainable and Robust Growth, from the year 2014 to the year 2019 the CAGR of our IT products is 48.5%.
Here are some cases for our storage products.
Our all flash storage was ranked leading position from the year 2016, although the different customer has different requirements on the storage.
Like some of them prefer automation, some focus on performance. Some pay more attention to Active-Active solutions and some care about storage consolidation.
For one of top insurance company in Italy, we improve resource provision and automatic maintenance from Hours to Minutes.
For one of the Top bank in Singapore, we improve business performance 5 times higher.
For one of the Top bank in Switzerland, we achieve Active-Active solution and realize 24 hours a day and 7 days a week business processing.
For one of the top banks in Brazil, we realize 33% lower OPEX for the bank by storage consolidation project.
Huawei also provides Industry-Leading Enterprise Network Products.
As ranked in 3rd report, our network Platform for SDN ranked in the position of leadership.
Our Data Center switches ranked No. 2; Wi-Fi 6 No. 1; Routers No. 2; Campus Switches No. 2 and Optical Transmission No. 1.
Huawei Network Solution Widely Deployed in FSI. Here are some cases.
One of the top banks in Brazil utilized the Huawei SDN Platform to reduce resource provision from hour to minutes and achieved automatic maintenance.
One of the top banks in Singapore, build their own DCI instead of Leasing to support robust traffic and BC/DR between Datacenters, reduced 50% TCO.
One of the top banks in Europe built All-optical Campus Network thereby increased 40% of efficiency and decreased TCO by 30%.
One of the top banks in China, constructed SDWAN with high bandwidth, low latency based on 5G. This leads to a 60% decrease in TCO.
The last solution is a new data lake platform. Given increased scenarios the number of users, transactions, and ecosystem connections.
The banking industry needs to find innovative ways to create new business models, AI and data-driven innovation are becoming the core capability.
It drives the precise marketing, real-time risk management, robotic customer services, real-time loans, etc.
For Huawei, we have Converged Data Lake to support structured and unstructured (or semi-structured) data to support AI or innovative business.
Based on our practice, we help our customers to reduce TCO by around 50%, for the data scale level, we can support the PB level. And for the performance, we can improve 30%.
More and more customers have selected Huawei. For the FSI industry, more than 1600 companies and 45 of the top100 banks have chosen Huawei as their digital transformation partner.
And these are our footprint for the FSI industry globally. As I mentioned, we’ve already worked with different types of partners to provide end-to-end capabilities for customers.
Here are some of our partners for each of the solutions.
Huawei provides comprehensive solutions for banks like: Mobile Service, New Core Banking, Smart Branches, New Infrastructure architecture, and a new data lake platform.
I believe some of our partners have already shared their practice together with Huawei earlier.
In the long-term process of serving financial customers, we are committed to helping customers achieving efficient, agile, and cost effective of their business by reconstruction of ICT architecture.
We are also helping customers achieving innovation through mobile service, new core banking, and data platform.
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I also believe we can work together to accelerate digital transformation of FSI industry.
Looking forward to working with you.
Witness the Keynote by Mr. Chen Kun te Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Global Financial Services Huawei EBG.
To register log on to www.africadigitalbanking.com
Huawei Co-Host Africa Digital Banking Summit with ICSA written by Shina Bamike
