Author: sunline

During the Financial Core Pioneer Alliance Meeting on February 24 2023, Sunline and Alibaba Cloud jointly released their “Cloud-native Core Banking Solution”. The solution will support the cloud-native reconstruction and smooth migration of the legacy core banking system, providing the most solid foundation for the digital transformation initiatives of banks.

The “Guiding Opinions on the Digital Transformation of the Banking and Insurance Industry” issued by China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission in 2022 had put forward the requirements of technological capabilities construction for the banking and insurance industries, including improving the flexibility of infrastructure resources and continuous supply capabilities, realizing gradual independence in development, design, and upgrade capabilities for distributed architecture, establishing agile R&D operations that can quickly respond to the needs of maintenance system, as well as achieving key technologies and key information infrastructure R&D capabilities, etc.

In order to fully support the digital transformation of the banking industry, Sunline and Alibaba Cloud have formally reached a comprehensive collaboration in 2022. With 20 years of deep experience and knowledge in the financial technology field, leading innovation and R&D capabilities in core banking system, as well as the first self-developed distributed core banking system, Sunline has become a strong alliance for Alibaba Cloud. The collaboration between the two parties also included setting up a special technical team to carry out in-depth integration of Sunline’s new generation cloud-native technology platform and core banking system with Alibaba Cloud SOFAStack, cloud-native distributed database, Feitian cloud technology base, etc., through “application technology integration”, jointly creating cloud-native key core capabilities.

The team took 10 months to complete high-performance and stability tests and verifications in key scenarios for core banking systems such as current transfers, account inquiries, as well as interest settlements and entries. At present, the joint solution has completed the technology stack and product system integration. Based on the standardized integration of components, the joint solution focuses on distributed transaction consistency and high-performance processing requirements of the core system in terms of unitized architecture specifications and standards, distributed transaction integration, database performance optimization, as well as full-link monitoring and emergency responses, including:-

Full-stack distributed and self-developed technical support (deployment integration): Ali Financial Cloud Zone and full-stack technology products realize the deployment and high-performance testing of Sunline’s new generation cloud-native technology platform (APS) + core system (V8).

Unified technology platform and implementation process (process integration): Based on Sunline’s new generation cloud-native technology platform, the solution is built based on integrated platform capability covering design state, research and development state, operation state, as well as operations and maintenance state, to support business modeling, domain-driven design, full-stack application life cycle management of application development, application operation, architecture governance, as well as operations and maintenance inspection.

Unitized multi-active architecture (architecture fusion): Based on unitized top-level design, the solution supports application-level and enterprise-level unitized architecture design features, jointly creating cloud-native core application unitized architecture and master data standards to achieve standardization of technical components on both sides.

Intelligent operation and maintenance monitoring (operation and maintenance integration): Starting from core operation and maintenance scenarios, the solution integrates high-availability support system to realize “first aid kit” intelligent diagnosis and actions of application components, technical components and infrastructure.

High-performance stability (high-performance integration): Online (query/transfer) and end-of-day batch (withdrawal and settlement) have been optimized with 30-50% improvement in key indicators such as transaction throughput, response time, and resource overhead, with the reading of overall disaster recovery ability RTO = 0/RPO < 1 minute.

In addition, the cloud-native core banking solution has passed the environmental and system tests of both Sunline and Alibaba Cloud, being able to fully support the cloud-native reconstruction and smooth migration of the core banking system, providing a solid foundation for the transformation and future-proofing of banks in the digitalization era.

Moving forward, Sunline will further leverage its advantages as a world-leading financial technology solution provider and the collaborations with Alibaba Cloud and other partners to continuously promote technological breakthroughs, build a core technology ecological chain, and contribute to the digital transformation of the financial industry worldwide.

Yesterday, global leading banking software and technology services company, Sunline co-hosted Digital Finance Forum 2023 with Huawei Cloud, the fastest growing cloud in APAC, and Malaysian leading technology solutions provider, Cloudpoint at Le Meridien Hotel Kuala Lumpur. Delegates comprising of Business, Digitization, IT and other finance leaders convened at the financial forum that is centred on capturing the real value from Cloud and Digital Transformation through Core Modernization.

Ken Siew, Regional CTO presenting about the path, strategy and solution of the Core Modernization Journey

Muhamad Fahmi bin Mustafa, Pre-Sales Senior Manager and Islamic Banking Lead presenting about the best practices of Big Data in China’s banking industry

Wang Wei Min, Product Director of Sunline Credit Card Business presenting about how can Credit Card Business further grow in the Digital Payment Era

Vincept Ip, Regional Sales Director of Hong Kong Region sharing his insights on the FX System Digitalization of bank in Asia

Sijukurmar Kumaran, Lead Industry Solution Architect – Banking and Financial Services, Huawei Cloud APAC presenting on how to redefine Digital Finance innovation through Huawei Cloud

Kai Chen, Co-founder & CTO of Alauda presenting about DevOps applications 

With 20 years of rich experience in China’s FSI industry and seven years of global business development, Sunline Digital Core Solution have been upgraded to version 3.2, which adopts the latest cloud native architecture and modular design, supports the most current digitization features in the market such as Open Banking, BNPL, Embedded Banking, Islamic Digital Banking, etc. During the event, Sunline and Huawei Cloud also featured various comprehensive financial technology solutions that are localized for the Asian region such as Sunline’s Big Data Platform, Digital Credit Card Platform and Digital FX Core Platform, while rolling out Sunline’s SaaS delivery model to drive the success of Malaysian financial institutions with a hyper-efficient, elastic scalability adoption alternative.

During the event, Sunline Technology (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd (Sunline) has also inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Cloudpoint Solutions Sdn Bhd (Cloudpoint) and Huawei Cloud Malaysia to give full play to their respective advantages, bringing richer digital financial services to the banks and financial institutions in Malaysia with their technical strengths and resources.

Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signing with Sunline, Cloudpoint and Huawei Cloud Malaysia

Commenting on the partnership, Ruby Zhou, Deputy CEO of Sunline International said, “Sunline is honored to collaborate with Huawei Cloud and Cloudpoint to further propel the Digital Transformation of the Financial Industry in Malaysia. As the leading financial IT experts and driven with a purpose to make banking relevant, we believe our continuous efforts and commitment in offering the most innovative technology advancements will empower Malaysian Banks to be more prepared to face the competitive market.”

Lim Chee Siong, Vice President of Huawei Cloud Malaysia, added, “The partnership with Sunline and Cloudpoint will see joint innovations in Digital Transformation for Finance Industry in Malaysia. Huawei Cloud focuses on establish mutual success with partners by leveraging each other expertise, and ultimately to bring more values to our customers.“

Sunline and strategic partners, Huawei and Cloudpoint who co-hosted the event, demonstrated their support to the concept of Bank Digitization through actively investing in the construction of joint solutions to help banks bring new capabilities to the global market more quickly and remain top performing. The continuous collaborations between the three parties will bring greater innovation to the Malaysian market, helping the financial industry in the country to accelerate their digitization journey.

In order to serve the real economy, promote the comprehensive deepening of the capital market reformation, realize high-quality development of the securities industry, condense the wisdom of industry research, and promote industry research exchanges, the Securities Association of China organized and carried out key research topics selection for 2022. A total of 476 project declarations were received, out of which, 183 were established key research projects.

During the selection, 59 outstanding project reports were finally selected by experts after an independent, objective and impartial review process by academic, regulatory and industry experts after 3 months of research. The “Research on Data Governance Construction Practice in the Intelligent Full Life Cycle of Securities Industry” jointly submitted by Sunline, Tianfeng Securities and Datablau was selected as one of the outstanding research topics, and it is also the only selected topic in the field of data governance.

Being able to stand out among nearly 500 submissions, the topic submitted by Sunline, Tianfeng Securities and Datablau undoubtedly highlights the ability and professional level of the research in the field of data governance construction.

1.   Background of the subject

Compared to banking and digital industries, data foundation in the securities industry is relatively weak, and data governance still faces many challenges like difficulties to carry out data governance for a longer timeframe due to lacking system, limitations in governance implementation due to low number of combined theory and implementation cases, disconnection of data research and development due to post-event rectification and inefficient data governance,  as well as problems related to upgrade due to large data governance workload. Although data governance is heavily invested in, but its business perception is not obvious and building a comprehensive and effective industry data governance system is full of challenges.

2.   Abstract of the project

Based on the current situation of the data governance system construction in the securities industry, Sunline, Tianfeng Securities and Datablau have established a sound methodology for the full-life cycle intelligent data governance of the securities industry with the goal of realizing data assets value, taking the data governance methodology of DAMA and other domestic and foreign data governance organizations as theoretical guidance, adopting the excellent cases of banks and the Internet as reference, and based on the practical achievements of the securities industry, combined with the data governance and experience in data life cycle management of Tianfeng Securities, the research have developed a data asset management platform for the securities industry that can realize full life cycle data governance.

3.   Topic ideas

The issues revolve around data processing and precision control, data governance R&D integration, data asset management empowerment, and data asset value assessment. The four directions carried out in the key research aims to provide reference for interbank data governance and empower the high-quality development of the capital market and securities industry.

Data process and precision control: Covers the entire data production, collection, transmission, consumption and destruction processes, scientific data life cycle control that conforms to the characteristics of the securities industry is formulated and the control process to the platform is implemented to achieve accurate control.

Data governance R&D integration: Embed data asset management platform and data modeling platform into (or apply to) the application and data R&D processes, transforming cumbersome and manual to intelligent and automated processing, improving post-event rectification to pre-event standardization and in-event control, ultimately improving R&D quality and achieving governance goals.

Data asset management and empowerment: Integrate data standards, data quality, metadata management and other functions to improve the efficiency of stock data management and control, improving data governance and R&D efficiency with the help of machine learning algorithms while establishing a data asset catalog, supporting business personnel data asset query and search, and ultimately empowering business.

Establish a quantitative system for data asset value assessment: Data asset evaluation is carried out from the aspects of data value and data quality through quantitative methods, providing reference for data application and guidance for IT construction investment.

Digital transformation has become the strategic consensus of many securities companies, and data governance is the only way forward to digital transformation. However, data governance is not a project that can be achieved overnight. A team of data governance talents with business knowledge, data thinking, and professional skills is the strong foundation and the intelligent data governance platform is an indispensable tool. In the future, Sunline will continue to explore artificial intelligence technology, improve the intelligence level of the data governance platform, and empower the securities industry to build a comprehensive and effective industry data governance system.

Digitalization is the new trend and standardization should follow the trend of the digital age. We must accelerate the digitalization of standards and support the construction of a more convenient, efficient and inclusive digital era with more complete, better and higher standards.

– 2022 World Standards Day China’s message (excerpt)

  

Internet, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain… The speed of digital technology, the scope of its radiation, and the depth of impact are unprecedented. Standardization in the digital age is playing an irreplaceable fundamental role. 

In 2021, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council published the “National Standardization Development Outline”, making it very clear that “standards are the technical support for economic activities and social development, and are an important aspect of the country’s basic system.” Standardization plays a fundamental and leading role in promoting the modernization of national governance systems and governance capabilities.

To further promote digital transformation in the financial industry, it is necessary to standardize data processing processes to highlight the value of data business, and build a standardized, process-based, integrated, and automated data governance system to ensure that the data architecture is reasonably planned, the data processing is clearly organized, the data assets can be inherited, ensuring the entire data production and consumption process can be effectively controlled. Therefore, formulating and implementing feasible supporting data standards to provide a strong guarantee and foundation for data elements is an important topic that all financial forces need to work together to promote.

Vigorously carrying out standardization work, leading the high-quality development of the industry

As a domestic financial technology leader, Sunline is committed in making “latent knowledge explicit and explicit knowledge standardized” by actively promoting collaboration with relevant institutions in the industry and domestic standardization organizations, driving a healthy and orderly development of the industry. 

In 2022, Sunline participated in the compilation of three reports and standard guidelines, namely the Financial Data Warehouse Development White Paper, the Financial Application Alliance Chain Technology Privacy Protection Research Report, and the Quantitative Evaluation Specification for Data Capabilities in the Financial Industry, covering different fields such as data architecture, data warehouse, and privacy computing, implementing standardization strategies with practical actions to lead the high-quality development of the industry.  

• Financial Data Warehouse Development White Paper released by the Institute of Financial Informatization 

As a representative of excellent enterprises in the financial technology industry and the company’s rich experience in data warehouse construction, Sunline was invited to participate in the compilation of the data warehouse construction strategy chapter of the Financial Data Warehouse Development White Paper. The report systematically sorts out the development history of data warehouse, deeply analyzes the application of data warehouse in the financial industry, and puts forward seven key technologies and ten development trends of financial data warehouse, providing references and guidelines for financial institutions to build, upgrade and optimize their data warehouse.

• “Financial Application Alliance Chain Technology Privacy Protection Research Report” released by Beijing Fintech Industry Alliance

As a member of the Beijing Fintech Industry Alliance, Sunline participated in the compilation of the “Financial Application Alliance Chain Technology Privacy Protection Research Report”. Focusing on the practical cases of combining alliance chain and privacy computing in joint risk control modeling and anti-money laundering, the report explored the application value of cutting-edge technologies in the financial industry, and providing reference for the application of alliance chain technology in privacy protection of the financial industry.

• Beijing Fintech Industry Alliance “Quantitative Evaluation Specification of Financial Industry Data Capability”

Combining practical experience in the fields of data governance and data quality improvement in the financial industry, Sunline was invited to participate in the compilation of the “Quantitative Evaluation Specification for Data Capability in the Financial Industry”. Focusing on the hierarchical quantitative evaluation indicators of capabilities in various data fields and based on national standards and industry standards, the report combs and formulates relevant standards and specifications.

In addition, Sunline has also participated in the compilation of the “Information Technology Artificial Intelligence Service Capability Maturity Evaluation Reference Model” and “Financial Data Security Scoring Guide” in recent years. Among them, the “Financial Data Security Scoring Guide” was led by the People’s Bank of China, with the participation of many domestic banks and technology companies. Sunline provided practical experience references by combining rich practice cases in the financial industry to provide suggestions for the preparation of standards such as data asset classification, data security level rules, and data security rating specifications. The “Information Technology Artificial Intelligence Service Capability Maturity Evaluation Reference Model” was initiated by the China Electronics Standardization Institute, which condensed industrial strength and cluster advantages to promote artificial intelligence standardization work.

Moving from more than just system co-builders towards becoming a standard-setter

Promoting standardization is a work that requires long-term accumulation and hard work, and is not achieved overnight.

• Walked thousands of miles, doubling product + market reputation

Sunline data products have provided tailor-made consulting and landing practical services for nearly 300 financial institutions such as China Development Bank, Agricultural Development Bank, Export-Import Bank of China, Bank of China, Postal Savings Bank, Bank of Communications, China Merchants Bank, Everbright Bank, Ping An Bank, Bank of Shanghai, Bank of Nanjing, etc., implemented and delivered more than 1,000 cases of various projects, enjoying a high reputation in the industry and fully recognized by customers.

Industry authority with strong guarantee of a professional team

In addition to serving as a member of the Big Data Governance Sub-committee of China Electronics Industry Standardization Technology Association, DAMA China Sub-branch, and Huawei Kunpeng Intelligent Data Alliance Big Data Industry Promotion Group, Sunline has officially become a DCMM (Data Management Maturity Assessment) assessment organization, and has a data product development and consulting planning team composed of high-end talents and senior experts. Among them, some team members have obtained a series of authoritative certifications such as “Data Governance Industry Expert”, “DAMA CDMP Data Management Professional Certification”, “Senior System Architect”, “Huawei Software Engineer Certification”, “Jushan SCDA Data Engineer Certification”, and “Transwarp Big Data Platform Certified Architect”.

In the past two years, Sunline has successively participated in the formulation of a number of industry standards, which is a testimony to Sunline’s strength in the field of big data, and is also a self-precipitation after 20 years of practical experience in data consulting services and product research and development, and is also a steady and big step taken by Sunline from a single system builder to a standard-setter. 

In the future, Sunline will continue to implement the National Standardization Development Outline, deeply participating in the preparation of relevant technical standards in the domestic financial industry, giving full play to the basic and strategic role of standardization in the construction of the financial industry data field, and leading a healthy, orderly and sustainable development of the industry with enterprise-level data intelligent products, multi-scenario data solutions and high-level big data technology.

 

Recently, Sunline received a letter of commendation from China Power Finance Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “China Power Finance”). In the letter, China Power Finance thanked and recognizes Sunline for its outstanding contribution to the construction of the finance company’s big data system in 2022. Sunline’s project team shown immense courage and hard work especially in the face of many difficulties under the epidemic, which was highly praised by China Power Finance.  

Sunline joined hands with China Power Finance to build a big data platform 

In 2019, China Power Finance launched its big data blueprint plan, aiming to build a shared application channel through financial business data through the big data platform, break down the data barriers of different formats, give play to the agglomeration and value-added role of financial big data, realizing effective integration and in-depth application of data resources. With the blessing of Sunline’s big data product and service capabilities, after 4 years, the two sides have worked together to achieve a series of fruitful results every step of the way, from in-depth status quo research, panoramic blueprint planning, basic big data platform construction to strengthening data governance and deepening data application, building a big data platform of “integration flow and batch, integration of data lakehouses”, creating an industry-leading data management system, and effectively helping the construction of digital finance.  

• One data pool 

The big data platform integrates the data of the company’s major business systems and accesses external data, realizing the vertical and horizontal saturation of data, breaking professional barriers. 

• Two sets of management systems 

The platform established the company’s data standard system, implemented data model, and built an index library, formulating more than 10 management systems, including the Implementation Rules for Data Management and the Implementation Rules for Data Standard Management to comprehensively build the company’s data management system and provide comprehensive guarantees for implementing data management responsibilities and improving data quality. 

• Three unifications 

Adopting the advanced architecture of “integration of flow and batch, integration of data lakehouses”, the big data platform fully incorporates structured data to gradually enriches unstructured data access, unifies quasi-real-time and real-time data calculation, and realizes internal and external data application to achieve “unified source, unified standard, unified provision”. 

• Four major applications 

The platform is built for four categories of applications: internal management applications, real-time monitoring applications, regulatory reporting applications, and external data applications, to meet the needs of multi-data application scenarios such as business operation analysis and regulatory reporting.  

Working together in the field of big data for many years, the letter of appreciation from China Power Finance is an affirmation and a huge encouragement for Sunline. Although the road to digital transformation for financial companies still has a long way to go, Sunline has been exploring and advancing how to build big data platform into a hub for data fusion and interaction, a platform for data value monetization, and a tool for data sharing and co-construction. 

Building a financial data platform system that activates the financial intelligence transformation engine 

In February 2022, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council issued a guide on Accelerating the Construction of a World-class Financial Management System by Central Enterprises, which attaches great importance to “improving the intelligent and forward-looking financial digital intelligence system”, requiring all enterprises to unify data specifications, avoid data silos, maintain data assets, and activate data value. “Data” has become the core asset element of financial digital transformation, but compared to commercial banks, financial companies are subject to factors such as late start, different business nature, etc., and there is still a big gap in big data capacity building. 

In order to dig deep into the value of data and effectively feedback the business, the establishment of an enterprise-level big data platform to comprehensively collect data, standardize data models, unify the indicator system, and expand data application scenarios has become an inevitable choice for the digital transformation of financial companies. 

Since 2016, Sunline has provided big data products and services for nearly 20 financial companies, and has successfully implemented more than 30 cases, covering big data blueprint planning, basic data platform construction, data warehouse construction, data application expansion, data governance consulting and implementation, etc. Based on years of practice accumulation and summary, Sunline has formed a deep understanding of the business operation, data flow direction and organizational structure of financial companies, and polished a set of enterprise-level big data platform construction solutions suitable for financial company industry scenarios.  

Sunline’s enterprise-level big data platform solution 

Sunline divides the big data platform of financial companies into five layers: data acquisition and exchange, data integration and storage, data application, data asset management, and platform general capabilities. 

• Data acquisition and exchange 

Establish two channels – offline and real-time acquisition to realize business structured data, offline manual ledger data, group data, and external data acquisition and storage based on Sunline’s data exchange platform, data supplementary recording platform and external data management platform, gradually incorporating unstructured data such as contracts and vouchers into data platform management to realize unified data acquisition, unified storage and unified processing as well as lay the foundation for breaking data silos that realizes horizontal penetration and vertical penetration of data 

• Data storage consolidation 

Through reasonable data stratification, efficient data processing, storage and service can be realized. Among them, integration model layer is the key and pain point of data system construction. Sunline draws on the best practices of commercial banks, and combines the business characteristics of financial companies to finally form seven areas covering all the main businesses of financial companies: scenarios, funds, agreements, products, resources, customers and public 

• Data applications 

Data application is a window to the value of data, and metrics are the core of data application. In order to unify the caliber of indicators and improve the ability of indicator sharing, Sunline sorted out and established standards for indicators in various fields of financial companies, forming two major indicator systems, offline and real-time, covering topics such as deposits, loans, settlement, intermediate business, capital business, finance, and investment business. In addition, it supports the data usage needs of application scenarios such as control, risk control, regulatory compliance, and financial performance through a variety of data display forms, including fixed data reports, multi-dimensional analysis, visual large screens, intelligent retrieval, mobile terminal quasi-real-time and real-time query. 

• Data asset management 

Combined with the industry’s advanced data management concepts, Sunline’s data asset management platform improves the data management system of financial companies, deepen the functions of the data management system, build a complete enterprise-level data view, and regularly carry out data quality verification to help the maximize the efficient implementation of data governance. 

• Platform common capabilities 

Compared with the establishment of a large data operations and maintenance team, building an efficient development and operation platform to unify code specifications and improve development efficiency has become the preferred choice of financial companies. Sunline’s data development platform can provide a complete set of data processing control functions for project implementation including data acquisition, data loading, data processing, data unloading, etc. Enterprise scheduling platform unifies the scheduling, monitoring and management of all the company’s systems and batch tasks, and improves the safety and stability of the system batch by statistically analyzing the batch data 

In the future, Sunline will continue to work with more financial companies to further expand the application of financial big data, playing the two-wheel driver role of “technology + data” to promote the high-quality development of the entire industry chain. 

Recently, the “11th China Listed Companies Forum” series of activities hosted by the domestic mainstream financial media – Daily Economic News, was grandly held virtually, during which the annual honor ceremony of China’s capital market, “The 12th China Listed Companies Word-Of-Mouth List 2022″ was officially released, and Sunline was named the “Listed Company with Best Board of Directors”. 

The 12th China Listed Companies Word-Of-Mouth List 2022, known as the “Oscars of China’s Listed Companies”, is an important annual event in the domestic capital market and an important communication platform between investors and listed companies. According to reports, this year’s word-of-mouth list selection officially commenced in mid-September, which lasted more than 3 months. After four major stages of public nomination, big data screening, model screening as well as institutional and public voting, 15 finalists that gathered professional word-of-mouth and market praise were announced. Sunline’s inclusion in the list of the best listed company boards is not only a high recognition of the company’s high-quality operation and management capabilities by the capital market, but also a strong affirmation of the company’s excellent performance in the capital market.

Sunline has been working hard in the past two decades, focusing on the field of financial technology. In the future, the company will continue to optimize its internal management system and enhance its sustainable development capabilities to further improve the company’s market investment value and brand image and shoulder social responsibility through innovation and technology, returning the support and trust of investors with practical actions. 

Shenzhen Sunline Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Sunline”, stock code 300348) is a leading financial technology solution and service provider in the world with 20 years of focus on financial technology innovation. The company adhere to technological self-reliance to continue deepening the application of digital technology in the financial field and providing financial institutions with consulting, financial technology products, financial IT services, and full-stack leading solutions covering digital finance, smart finance, and other business fields. With China’s best practices in digital transformation, Sunline export smart financial capabilities overseas and have grown together with more than 800 financial customers and 1 billion C-end users around the world. Sunline aims to face the global market with strength, reshape the new pattern of digital technology, and spread China’s financial technology influence globally.

The wide application of big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain and other technologies in the field of new retail has provided important support for the retail digital transformation of banks. The emergence of “customer-centric” retail business model has become a new strategy for the development of retail business of financial institutions in the new era. The “Big Retail Operation Analysis System” of a leading city commercial bank in East China built by Sunline has helped the bank effectively immerse retail data assets and steadily improve the marketing conversion rate as well as the operation and management efficiency since its launch, enhancing the digital transformation of the bank’s retail sales business.

At present, external competitions and internal challenges are accelerating the digital transformation process of commercial banks, and the retail business has become a “new engine” for profit growth of commercial banks due to its characteristics such as large customer scale, high potential value and high return on assets.

“Information is the lubricant oil of the 21st century, and analysis is the engine”. A large number of information sources and data analysis are the key to the successful acceleration of new retail transformation. In the era of big data retail industry as well as in the face of a huge customer group and complex and changeable market demand, in order to adapt to market changes and grasp market dynamics in a timely manner, it is necessary to analyze the data of all aspects of retail and obtain scientific and effective conclusions to guide decision-making.

Sunline understand the needs of retail digital transformation in domestic banks. With deep coupling of digital technology with retail business processes, Sunline’s solution provides banks with digital retail operation analysis solutions covering retail data collection, data integration, data processing, data services, and data application support that builds a basic data platform for retail applications and services to strengthen retail business data governance, effectively precipitating retail data assets and providing data services for the whole chain of retail business such as marketing, risk control, and business decision-making, ultimately improving retail customer acquisition insights and value mining capabilities and accelerating retail business digital transformation.

With mature solutions and professional implementation services, Sunline has built the big retail operation analysis systems for many joint-stock banks such as Everbright Bank, Ping An Bank, Industrial Bank, Hengfeng Bank, etc.

The big retail operation analysis system allows banks to make use of “numbers” in decision-making

Sunline participated in the construction of the large retail operation analysis system of a leading city commercial bank in East China, launching three parts this year: personal loan business analysis, customer capital flow analysis, and retail customer portrait; helping the bank build a micro to macro construction. The big retail operation analysis system boosts daily data analysis and strategic decision-making, through refined, intelligent and digital analysis and decision-making, effectively supporting the development, operation and process management of the bank’s retail sales business:

• Personal loan operation analysis: The “Personal Loan Operation Comprehensive Evaluation” module provides business skills and guidance marketing strategies based on the comprehensive evaluation of the loan business of institutions and account managers in six dimensions. The “Indicator Kanban” module builds a rich personal loan indicator warehouse, which can support user-defined indicators, configure indicators in nine grids and display the increase or decrease of indicator changes in multiple dimensions and from a full perspective. The “real-time large screen” module displays marketing and operation indicators through a big screen, guiding marketing and assisting business decision-making in real time.

• Customer capital flow cloud map: improves the existing retail capital cloud map front-end application system and visually displays real-time capital flow through customer capital inflow and outflow, product purchase redemption, customer level migration and other dimensions, and assist product operation decisions.

• Retail customer profile: Establish a panoramic view of retail customers, and build customer profiles based on six dimensions: customer identification, value scoring, customer labels, marketing insights, company linkage, and risk information. Through a deeper level comprehensive value evaluation and related information analysis and deep mining of customer value to empower precision marketing, the module help achieve customer differentiated operation and daily refined management.

Real-time data processing mechanism to visualize data flow

The huge amount and categories of consumer information is the foundation of retail data analysis, and how to process effective information in a timely manner, feedback to the business, and assist decision-making in the massive amount of data generated every day is the key to maximizing the value of data.

Generally, data synchronization processing mechanism includes offline and real-time methods. While offline data processing mode can meet the needs of most business analysis scenarios, in the face of real-time warning, monitoring and other scenarios, the real-time requirements of indicators reach the minute level or even the second level of data processing, becoming the better solution. Sunline’s real-time data processing solution adopts the method of combining streams and batches, real-time data flow unified access, computing, storage, service, offline data supplementation of dimension tables and other information, providing data guarantee and real-time data verification through offline indicators to ensure data accuracy.

In the construction project of a large retail operation analysis system for a city commercial bank, Sunline introduced real-time data processing technology combined with the bank’s retail business process to extract a series of real-time data application scenarios to achieve efficient and real-time transmission of multi-dimensional data such as business marketing, risk monitoring, and efficiency monitoring of all the retail financial lines in the entire bank.

• Real-time marketing screen: provides real-time indicator dynamics for three types of loans, including quota, mortgage and operations for the retail financial line of the main branch, focusing on business incentives.

• Real-time operation screen: provides real-time dynamics of key indicators of the overall scale of personal loans and branch operation analysis for the retail finance line of the head branch, focusing on operation analysis and decision-making.

• Customer capital flow cloud map: displays real-time capital inflow and outflow TOP5, product purchase redemption TOP5 and other indicators on the large screen, focusing on product decision-making.

Since the launch of the system, the total number of visits to the personal loan operation analysis system has reached nearly 150,000 people and the total number of users has reached nearly 1,000 people, accumulating more than 2,000 users and nearly 40,000 visits in retail customer profiles. The operation of the capital cloud map is stable, which effectively supports the monitoring of capital inflow and outflow. Through Sunline’s service upgrade, the retail marketing conversion rate and operation management efficiency of a city commercial bank have steadily improved, and the consumer side has continued to respond with positive feedbacks.

In the future, based on the support of big data and massive data analysis technology, Sunline will continue to work with financial institutions to create a large retail business model that closely integrates the platform and users to truly realize “customer-centric” retail digital transformation!

On November 22, 2022, Sunline commemorated Gansu Rural Credit Cooperative in the occasion of their 17th anniversary of the Establishment by successfully putting the new generation core business system into production, benchmarking the institution as the first provincial rural credit practice case for Sunline’s V8 core system in the western region and marking a solid step in the digital transformation strategy of the institution.

Facing the challenges of rapid business growth head-on

Gansu Rural Credit Cooperative was founded on November 22, 2005 as a local financial institution directly managed by the Gansu Provincial People’s Government, with 83 legal entities including 37 rural commercial banks, 5 rural cooperative banks, 41 county-level associations, more than 2,200 business outlets, more than 10,000 convenient financial service points and service terminals, and more than 22,000 employees to serve the people. As of the end of June 2022, the balance of various deposits was RMB 519.742 billion and the balance of various loans was RMB 383.20 billion, ranking first among banking institutions in the province.

However, with the rapid development of business, Gansu Rural Credit Cooperative was facing challenges associated with accelerated product innovation and increasingly stringent requirements of regulatory authorities in the mobile Internet era, hence, it is necessary for the institution to reconstruct the original core system architecture and business system to create a new generation core systems that is future-proofed, secure, efficient and able to meet the requirements of professional operation.

The criteria for selecting core system service providers in Gansu Rural Credit are very strict, which not only requires the leading technical index performance and business functions of the core system of the service provider, but also requires its core system to have sufficient flexibility and stability to better support the “three rural areas” business of Gansu Rural Credit Corporation.

Sunline V8 core business system is the industry’s first “microservices + unitizes” distributed core with forward-looking, advanced, high availability and scalability capabilities, perfectly realizing the compatibility of “steady state” and “sensitive state”, supporting multi-legal person operations which can fully support the business needs of the rapid development of Gansu Rural Credit Cooperative.

In addition, Sunline deeply understands the needs of banks. Combined with 20 years of implementation experience in the core system of banks, Sunline’s proposed scientific solutions is most suited for the future development of Gansu Rural Credit Corporation, helping the institution embark on a new journey of serving “three rural areas”, rural revitalization and the local economy with modern financial technology.

Remarkable results with quasi-dual-effect data

Sunline’s project team has a peak of 38 and an average of 25 on-site manpower, responsible for the development of 6 core system modules including public (cash, vouchers, institutions, tellers, pricing), deposits (for business, private, debit cards), loans (loans, debt assets), customer information (customer management, list management, customer risk), general ledger (accounting engine, big ledger, statements), equity capital; docking payment, credit, digital banking, intermediate business and other 27 major peripheral systems.

Gansu Rural Credit Cooperation is one of the local financial institutions in Gansu Province with the widest distribution of institutions, the largest number of outlets and employees, the deepest sinking inclusive financial services, and the closest connection with the “three rural areas”. The intertwined business, resulting in complex system construction and many related systems further escalates the difficulty of the project. However, the project team braved difficulties and planned to ensure the construction of the entire core system, and after more than 20 data migrations and 7 rounds of online drills, including 3 rounds of full-line practical exercises, the core was put into production in late November 2022.

The new core system will achieve the following goals:

• Unified management of customers in the whole bank by changing the problems of inconsistent customer information and inability to identify customers in previous credit card system and core system, and provide a unified view of customers, accounts, data standards, and customer reporting.

• Rapid product innovation with the use of parameter configuration and product factory has changed the problem of long and slow response in previous product development, realizing quick launch of new products to better serve customers.

• Differentiated pricing to achieve multi-dimensional and multi-level pricing support, helping the organization provide better pricing for high-quality customers through customer identification, customer rating, and customer contribution and supporting the organization’s marketing strategy to prioritize key customers.            

• Separation of transaction and accounting solves the problem of uneven accounting in the branches of various legal entities, and making great improvements in accounting processing and position balance monitoring to realize real-time early warning and greatly improve the security of capital position accounts between various legal persons.           

• Multi-legal entity structure model of the new core system has changed the business product rules that can only be used by default, allowing each legal person to set up product rules, pricing models and marketing forms according to its own requirements.        

• Microservices architecture decoupled between services improves the high availability and dynamic expansion capabilities of core systems, quickly responding to the business requirements and greatly reducing the risks and costs of system construction, upgrade, and O&M.

• The adoption of hierarchical architecture realizes effective separation of data, services, transactions and displays, realizing the separation of business data and business logic, loose coupling between system modules, and reasonable distribution of functions to adapt to changes in IT systems, services, products and processes.          

• The adoption of open platform design uses development technology independent of middleware platform and database platform, as well as open, versatile and secure software and hardware platforms.  

The new core system has greatly improved data integrity, authenticity and logic, making up for the incomplete customer information, incomplete account information and insufficient details of internal account management in the original core, providing real and reliable data certificates for supervision and reporting. After the new core system went live, it ran stably with more than 10 million transactions during the day, and shown outstanding end of the day efficiency with 35-minute end of the day record and 20-minute end of the general ledger.

During the whole project construction, leaders of the provincial institution gave a lot of support and care to the project team. One month before the launch, the epidemic situation in Lanzhou was serious, and in order to ensure the smooth launch, key operators stayed in the computer room, and the rest used the remote operation mode ins hotel isolation room to complete data inspection and problem troubleshooting. But it all stopped at the test, “It’s a miracle to be able to go live on time during lockdown.” state the person in charge of the bank.

Gansu Rural Credit Cooperation not only uses the power of financial technology to give strong momentum to the high-quality development of various businesses, but also dispatches a large number of business personnel from various banks to deeply participate in system requirements and testing, cultivating a number of business and technical backbones for the digital construction and long-term development of banks.

As one of the most influential financial institution in Northwest China, the new core system project is of great exemplary significance for Northwest Territory. Sunline will continue to uphold a professional attitude, be responsible for customer needs, and contribute to the digital transformation of more customers in the future.

With the successful commissioning of the new core system of a provincial city commercial bank, the bank has also awarded the data governance project to Sunline. As the main project vendor, Sunline has created a unique data governance system for the bank based on its deep knowledge and understanding of banking business processes, data systems, IT systems, etc., helping improve the top-level design of data governance, establish a data governance operation mechanism, and promote the implementation of data standards in the bank’s new core and peripheral systems.

Governance has turned data “swamps” into “gold mines”

Data governance, as an effective means for enterprises to manage and apply data assets, can drive the value creation of data elements in business, management, and strategic decision-making. In the era of digital intelligence, good data governance will bring irreplaceable competitive advantages to enterprises and is the only way for financial institutions to transform themselves.

As a leading financial IT solution service provider, Sunline has been deeply involved in the field of data governance for nearly 20 years, providing data governance consultation, program design, project implementation and other services for more than 100 financial customers. With the advancement of the wave of digital transformation, Sunline has always been driven by market demand, continuously innovating and upgrading the solution capabilities, forging industry-leading comprehensive data governance solutions including strategic planning, organizational structure system process design, data governance consulting, data governance platform development and implementation, etc.

Aiming to tackle the data governance issues at different stages and levels of financial institutions, Sunline tailors a set of practical short, medium and long-term solutions for customers based on their own blueprint and implementation route plan to help customers maximize the value of data assets and turn data “swamps” into “gold mines”.

Treating the root cause, deepening data governance from the source

A city commercial bank started its data governance refresh in 2017, forming a governance structure of “one center, three fields, and three platforms”. However, in the process, the transformation problem of source systems always seems like a mountain ahead, resulting in the difficulty of achieving the desired results in both the breadth and depth of governance. In 2021, the city commercial bank took the construction of a new generation of core systems as an opportunity to simultaneously launch a data governance project, aiming to improve the top-level design of data governance, establishing a data governance operation mechanism, as well as improving the ability and efficiency of data monetization and management.

The construction content of this project involves the improvement of metadata management, data quality management, master data management, data asset management, and the promotion of data standards in new core and peripheral systems. Since the data governance project team of Sunline won the bid in November 2021, after detailed research and meeting review, 95 systems of the bank were finally included in the scope of the bid. The scope and impact of the project are extraordinary, and the professional capabilities of the implementation team are also put forward higher requirements, in addition to rich experience in data governance implementation, it is also necessary to have a full understanding of the current situation of the bank’s business and data. After one year, Sunline’s data governance project team cooperated with the construction of the new core system and successfully created a unique data governance system for the city’s commercial bank.

Promoting the implementation of data standards            

A good data standard system facilitates data sharing, interaction and application, and can reduce the work of data conversion between different systems. Sunline helped the bank complete the data standard work of 95 systems. Through unified data definition and standardized data management, the system broke through the dilemma of “different names between systems”, solving problems such as inconsistent business descriptions and statistical indicators and greatly improving the efficiency of data sharing.

Effective governance of metadata           

Metadata is the foundation of data asset management, with the quality directly determining the availability of data assets. This project focuses on the supplementary and improvement of metadata. The completion rate reached 100%, making a clear, easy to understand and unambiguous data asset catalog, greatly improving the user experience. In addition, a standardized metadata system and process have been formulated to realize strong control of metadata change online, fully ensuring the standardization of data, allowing stable operations between upstream and downstream systems.

Improve data quality      

High-quality data is an important basis for analytical decision-making and business development planning. The data quality inspection system built by Sunline has been refined and sorted out nearly 1,000 data quality audit rules, realizing the closed-loop management of data quality problems from discovery to processing through the data quality problem processing process and related functions, thereby promoting the continuous improvement of data quality.

Establish a master data management system     

In view of the current situation that employee data is scattered everywhere and there is a lack of unified management, Sunline relies on the “Employee Master Data Governance Implementation Plan” to formulate and promote the implementation of employee master data to achieve unified coding, name, management, and bank-wide sharing of employee data.

Upgrade data governance tools 

–       Upgrade the data quality distribution function of the data management and control platform to make the process of solving data quality issues more standardized, systematic, and secure.

–       Launch the metadata change application work order functions including reviewing, approval, and release by the data governance platform to ensure the stable operations.

–       Upgrade the data asset management display and release process functions of the data management and control platform, improving data assets readability and ease of use.

Through the construction of this project, Sunline has joined hands with the city commercial bank to implement a set of mechanisms that continuously turn data into assets and future-proof the bank’s business through visible, understandable, usable and operational data. However, data governance is a long-term work, and in the follow-up operation, maintenance and monitoring process, Sunline will help the bank continue to ensure data quality, adapt to the diversified needs of continuous business development, and ensure steady improvement of the bank’s data quality.

Recently, Sunline helped a city commercial bank’s launched their core system and data governance projects. After 13 months of hard work, a stable, efficient and advanced new core business system perfectly meets the bank’s business needs and technical requirements, fully reflecting “customer-oriented and data-driven” to stimulate new impetus for the rapid development of the bank.

Upgrading new cores and reshaping new advantages

The previous generation of core business system of the city commercial bank has made great contributions to its stable development, but with the further deepening of financial system reformation and the advancement of interest rate marketization, this core business system cannot adapt well to the development of business under the new situation, especially in terms of customer information management, flexible parameter configuration, flexible pricing, product factory, refined data support and other aspects.

Therefore, it is urgent to support the bank’s rapid development needs in the future through the construction of a new generation core business systems to meet the business needs and technical requirements, providing effective data support for the management system to fully reflect “customer-centricity”, meet the changing business needs, rapid product innovation, automate efficient business processes, and ultimately meeting the level of risk prevention, control, operation and management of various financial regulatory authorities.

Sunline is a leading financial IT solutions provider in China, and the only company that can independently provide three series of products and solutions for commercial banking, management and channels in the country. In addition, Sunline’s core system products have been fully affirmed by the market, being successfully launched and operated stably in many joint-stock commercial banks, urban commercial banks, rural commercial banks and private banks, winning the trust and choice of customers through experience.

The new generation core system meets the current needs of the industry with customer-centricity, business parameterization, multi-legal person, product factory, interest rate marketization, rate parameterization, local and foreign currency integration, multi-dimensional pricing differentiation, customer accounting and internal liquidation, general ledger processing and other characteristics, to meet the requirements of being high performance, high availability, high concurrency and collaboration with other information systems, with risk management and control capabilities to achieve refined management of basic data support and rapid innovation of financial products, fully meeting the bank’s future business development.

Maintaining stability and improving quality through excellent technical background

The core team of 30 professional and responsible members ensure the smooth launch of the project on schedule. The reliable products and responsible team ensured timely and accurate demand responses, and allowed the new generation core systems to be highly recognized by the industry.

The whole project was progressing in an orderly and steady manner and the project covered core accounting system includes all modules including public, deposit, card, loan, and accounting; the core is connected to 107 systems and 718 peripheral interfaces, the rewrite of detailed design specification of the whole module with more than 8,000 pages, detailed ER diagram of the whole module, and more than 10,000 core test cases of the design; A total of 20 rounds of data migration with nearly 1,000 inspections, 2 sand table drills, 4 production drills, and a completed one-time production.

The new generation core system fully meets the technical and business needs of the industry with

1. Technical characteristics that:

–       comply with SOA architecture requirements, support flexible expansion, reasonable business component planning, moderate granularity and flexible expansion, meet the bank’s personalized requirements, and fully support the processes of the bank.

–       adopt open architecture and mainstream technology platform that supports horizontal expansion, large-scale relational database, mainstream middleware and open platform hardware, provide standard financial services with consistent channels, as well as meet the requirements of stability, flexibility and scalability.        

–       support multi-application server deployment architecture with read-write separation structure design, separation of query transactions and update transactions, and dual-database operation mode.

–       provides an intuitive graphical operation development platform, product and parameter management platform.

–       releases a complete and stable service interface to the outside world, and has a complete interface description document.

–       supports data standardization, and through the implementation of the project, the system itself has completed its own data standardization processing.

–       has a hotspot account processing mechanism, which greatly improves the processing capacity of hotspot accounts.

–       has an asynchronous accounting mechanism, which can improve the overall performance of the system by 10-20% and shorten the response time of online transactions.

–       has SQL cache mechanism and data cleaning mechanism.         

2. Business characteristics that:

–       reflect customer-centricity and service-oriented design concept to achieve differentiated services for customers.

–       has a strong product factory, with a unified product catalog, product design and product assembly mechanism, highly flexible and configurable, easy to master product parameters that can support rapid product innovation and timely response to the market.

–       differentiated pricing support for customers, interest rate marketization, exchange rate marketization, and differentiated pricing of rates and tax rates.

–       realizes the separation of trading and accounting, zero-level clearing, and 24x7x365 customer transactions.

The system has a complete multi-mode account system with a flexible and configurable account structure to fully meet the operational requirements of banks for account management.             

After the new generation of core system is launched, the new product workshop greatly shortens the product development cycle, standardizes system development, improves the delivery quality of application systems, and accelerates the efficiency of system optimization. The overall data volume of the core was moved in less than 3 hours, with the transaction volume on the first day reaching 4 million, the batch consumption at the end of the day took only about 30 minutes, the interest settlement of nearly 170,000 loans took less than 200 seconds, and the TPS broke 10,000, far exceeding the performance of the original system as well as the performance of the industry.

This project is another successful case of Sunline’s launch in China market, providing experience and reference for the transformation and upgrade of other banks in the region and the construction of a banking system of the same scale in the country.

In this project, Sunline not only helped the city commercial bank complete the construction of a new core system, but also successfully created a unique data governance system for it.

If you are curious to know how to turn a data “swamp” into a “gold mine”, check out the next feature article!