Author: sunline

On September 21, hundreds of leaders from the financial industry convened virtually at the full-day 2021 Malaysian Banking and Finance Summit to discuss the new challenges that banks have to cope with in the new normal. As the global pioneer and leader in Digital Banking, Sunline was invited as a technological partner to share their invaluable information and insights in Digital Transformation.

The COVID Pandemic has caused widespread disruption globally to nations, economies, business and society. The prolonged pandemic have caused banks globally to face the brunt of reduced earnings as well as higher loan provisions with an almost universal loan moratorium to save businesses. The increasing use of new technologies, emergence of digital banks, enhancement requirements of operational effectiveness and productivity as well as war for talent are among the main challenges faced the financial industry. For the foreseeable future, banks will continue to escalate towards all-digital, and to remain relevant, they will have to strive to be digital natives and be future-proofed.

　

During the summit, Matthew Chen, CEO of Sunline Holding has represented Sunline to share his insights on how banks should embrace the changes caused by the technologies, rather than viewing it as a disruption and threat. He also shares collaboration is key for banks to stay relevant in the Banking 4.0 era, where banking is anytime, anywhere. As one of the pioneers who have grown with the wave of digital transformation in China, Sunline has invaluable information and insights about its experiences that will undoubtedly help traditional financial institutions thrive in the new era. 

The recent Kunpeng Application Innovation Competition 2021 National Finals came to a successful conclusion at Huawei Songshan Lake Base. Since the launching of the competition in April this year, it has attracted the participation of more than 1,200 companies and more than 5,000 developers from 23 provinces. After winning the semi-finals, Sunline Intelligent Marketing Center has won the bronze medal in the national finals.

Compared to the previous years, the application scenarios of this year’s competition plan are more diversified, focusing on the key areas of national economy and livelihood of the people. The national finals of this competition invited university professors, industry alliance organizations, industry standards organizations, mainstream open-source communities, industry senior architects as well as investment professionals as judges. The finalists were judge in terms of multiple dimensions such as innovation, technological leadership, business prospects and social value.

Sunline Intelligent Marketing Center integrated on Kunpeng ecosystem has shown obvious technological innovation and leadership.

Equipped with Huawei Kunpeng’s hardware infrastructure, Sunline Intelligent Marketing Center is a flexible and scalable marketing center for banks, securities, funds, trusts, group companies and other enterprises that provides a full-cycle support, management and supervision for marketing management that realizes flexible operations and one-key deployment as well as unifies the scenario management process. The joint solution has four major advantages including convenience, ease of use, high efficiency and comprehensiveness. It has been unanimously recognized by customers and has broad commercial prospects and social value.

During the construction of the intelligent marketing center, a full-stack optimization of the platform is realized through Kunpeng BoostKit database enablement suite, MySQL OLTP scene lock optimization, Bisheng JDK and HDFS EC acceleration. The solution can solve the common pain points in scenario construction such as streaming, batch processing and slow interactive queries, ensuring the scenario continues to expand as needed. At the same time, Kunpeng’s in-depth optimized algorithm library covers commonly used algorithm types, helping to give full play to the ability of model building of strategic marketing center.

2021 is the first year of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan which clearly proposes the acceleration of digitalization and expanding the digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, cloud computing and network security. Under the opportunity of the times, Sunline will continue to deepen the collaboration with Huawei to implement the “platform + ecosystem” strategy and jointly promote the digital development and construction of China’s financial industry.

Recently, the China Software Industry Association published the 2021 Software and IT Services Competitiveness Report and hosted the 2021 Top 100 Enterprise Summit in Beijing, officially announcing the top companies in the industry and Sunline was named one of the Top 100 Enterprises with Most Competitive Software and IT Services.

Making into the list holds a heavyweight influence in China’s software and IT service industry. Enterprises in the industry are carefully evaluated from multiple aspects such as scale, efficiency, quality, technology, R&D as well as social responsibility, selecting only the most outstanding software companies that play an important support and promotion role for social and economy of the country.    

China Software Industry Association has affirmed the comprehensive strength of Sunline in the financial software and IT services subdivision from four dimensions:

1. Improved scale

Sunline has grown against the epidemic situation in 2020, with an increased in the number of employees exceeding 6000 people and has achieved a historic breakthrough in market development and advanced into the market of state-owned banks.

According to the annual report of Sunline, the operating income in 2020 shown a18.28% year-on-year increase. Sunline was also selected as the “Top 100 Shenzhen Software Business Revenue in 2020” by the Shenzhen Software Industry Association.

2. Innovation-driven development

Sunline’s R&D investment in 2020 accounted for 11.60% of total its revenue and more than 90% of its employees are technical personnel. In 2020, breakthroughs in multiple fields were achieved such as distributed, big data, artificial intelligence and open banking, pioneering the first “microservice + unitized” core systems, comprehensive data asset management solutions, data service platforms and comprehensive value management platforms, independent research and development of financial marketing empowerment systems, intelligent collection robots and intelligent accounting systems as well as creation of an enterprise-level financial open platform based on API technology to empower the digital transformation of the financial industry.

3. Deep nurturing of its international market

This year marks the 5th anniversary of Sunline going overseas. As the first Chinese financial technology brand expanding overseas, the gradually maturation of Sunline’s overseas businesses has withstood the adverse effects of the pandemic and business has developed steadily, covering more than 10 countries and regions including Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines, providing digital solutions to nearly 20 bank customers in Southeast Asia, allowing Chinese financial technology to reach a global influence.

4. Building an innovative ecosystem

Sunline has established ecological cooperation with domestic database, cloud and server manufacturers such as Huawei and Tencent to jointly build a safe and controllable system based on financial scenarios. It is currently based on Sunline’s core system, data warehouse, marketing center and risk control mid-end, data asset management platforms, etc. Many joint solutions have been launched and successfully implemented to a number of banks, continuously advancing the development China’s financial industry.

Under the development opportunities of the digital age, Sunline is constantly playing the role of the a leader in software innovation to actively explore new financial technology and models, ultimately play a part in contributing to the continuous development of China’s software industry.

On August 26, the 2021 China (Shenzhen) Digital Economy Industry: Kunpeng Application Innovation Competition Award Ceremony was successfully held. The Kunpeng Application Innovation Competition jointly organized by the Huawei’s Kunpeng Ecological Innovation Center, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, China Software Industry Association, Green Computing Industry Alliance as well as China Computer Industry Association in 23 provinces and cities across China, is a top event for global developers.

The Shenzhen Competition Division attracted a total of 90 corporate teams and 600 developers participating for the competition. After a few rounds of careful reviews and selections, only 43 corporate teams entered the finals. Sunline Intelligent Marketing Platform emerged the champion in the financial field after a fierce competition covering four dimensions: program innovation, technological leadership, business prospects and social value, successfully entering the national finals.

Sunline Intelligent Marketing Platform have shown great value to banks and have been applied in many joint-stock banks, city commercial banks, rural commercial banks, etc., successfully helping banks improve quality and efficiency through big data.

The solution is based on the mining of multi-source, massive and real-time data, realizing T+0 real-time marketing, rapid assembly of lists and activities as well as is the best one-stop marketing management for bank customers. Through data model analysis, accurate correspondence between customers and products can be established to achieve dynamic customer portraits, accurate matching of products and needs, helping banks achieve smart marketing and personalized services.

The solution is based on top-down design that opens up the closed loop of the entire precision marketing process, realizing real-time sharing of label data, flexible configuration of activities and one-click deployment of customer life cycle scenarios.

Through internal and external data integration, data analysis and mining models, built-in decision-making engines, real-time processing technology as well as visual analysis methods, the solution effectively builds a comprehensive marketing management.

Sunline’s big data business has been developing rapidly. Through the continuous integration with Kunpeng ecosystem, Sunline Intelligent Marketing Platform give full play to the capabilities of data to improve quality and efficiency for the digital transformation and development of the financial industry.

 

Since its establishment in June 2021, Huawei’s Financial Partner Go Global Program (FPGGP) has actively integrated resources to empower the globalization of financial technology partners. As the first board of directors, Sunline served as the rotating chairman and hosted the “Southeast Asian Digital Financial Trends and National Regulatory Policies” event on August 18.

Sunline started its overseas expansion journey in 2016 and its current business covers more than 10 countries and regions. The virtual event convened more than 60 participants under the FPGGP program to analyze the overall financial status and development trend of the Southeast Asian market. Based on its overseas expansion experience, Sunline shared with the members of the FPGGP the development an in-depth interpretation of financial regulatory policies in Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia as well as its the first-hand experience of going international, aiming to help empower domestic partners to expand the overseas markets together and enable more Chinese companies to go global and further expand the commercial pie of the financial industry.

At the meeting, Yu Song, Deputy Director of Sunline Holdings Solutions and Product Center share his analysis on the status quo and development trend of digital finance in Southeast Asia. He pointed out that the current political environment in Southeast Asia is stable. Under the Belt and Road Initiative, countries are vigorously developing their economies and driven by the global digital economy, Southeast Asian countries have actively integrated digitalization into their national strategies with financial technologies, open banking, etc. gradually becoming the focus of IT investment in the Asia-Pacific region, providing a good environment and opportunities for Chinese vendors to venture overseas.

On the other hand, Niu Xiaoli, General Manager of the Solution Department of Sunline Group, shared her analysis on the specific financial regulatory environment of Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. These three countries are representative in Southeast Asia in terms of national macro characteristics and digital progress. Based on the practical experience of Sunline, she also shared the regulatory characteristics of each country. Under the vision of a global financial center, she highly encourages innovation and adopts a unified regulatory model to create an open and inclusive business environment for enterprises.

At the end of the event, Yu Song also shared a “Detour Avoidance Kit” to partners in the pre-sales, in-sales and after-sales, emphasizing the importance of discussions and adjustments to prevent additions and changes to the scope of work after contract signing. He also advised to pay more attention to teamwork especially during the implementation and construction stages by establishing the unity of ideas, language, goals and knowledge as well as the bridge for direct contact with senior management. To maintain a sustainable business, there must be a comprehensive and good after-sales services after product is delivered.

In this event, Sunline discussed the Southeast Asian financial environment with an open and shared mentality, aiming to help FPGGP members better understand the overseas market environment and allow the FPGGP partners’ in enabling financial digital transformation. The value of innovation capabilities empowers Chinese financial technology companies to go overseas and exports the country’s leading financial technology models overseas, ultimately allowing China’s financial technology reach global influence.

At 3.30 a.m. on August 8, there was good news about the successful launching of Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank’s new generation core banking system came from the control room, marking the first application of “microservices architecture + domestic distributed database” in China’s banking industry.

With great courage to be a pioneer, Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank replaced its core

Speaking of Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank’s initiative, we have to mention Kunshan county’s courage to “be a pioneer” that allowed it to be the top 100 counties in the country. The bank with local business outlets and widest service coverage in the county has also followed Kunshan’s spirit in empowering it transformation and development with technological innovation.

An important step in the transformation and development is “core” replacement and it is a big “operation”. Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank has been very cautious about in choosing the new core.

At about that time, Sunline’s new distributed “microservices + unitized” V8 core system was put into production for Bank of Dongguan with outstanding performance. Its industry-leading distributed architecture set off a boom in the field of banking core systems, arousing widespread curiosity in the industry.

In terms of technological advancement and implementation experience guarantee, Sunline’s new-generation core system has become the number one choice for Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank. After multiple communications, technical exchanges and on-site simulation demonstrations, the collaboration commenced.

Achieving efficiency and efficacy with the right route

In July 2020, Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank’s new core project officially launched a demand gap analysis.

“The service experience of nearly a hundred core systems tells us that if we want to avoid detours as much as possible so we must plan the right route from the early stage,” said Zhang Gong, the project manager from Sunline who was in charge of the project at that time.

In the early stage of the project development, Sunline project team paid great attention to the direction of core system construction, spending a lot of time and energy with related business and IT departments of Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank for in-depth communication and understanding of the bank’s situation and needs. After repeated and rigorous analysis and evaluation, both parties reached a consensus that the use of domestic distributed databases to realize the core would be the best route. This is more suitable for Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank’s demand for a sharp increase in business volume due to changes in business scenarios and it is also more in line with the finance development trend.

Demand analysis conduction

“Our V8 core banking system has an advanced technology platform with mature and leading business model as well as good compatibility and adaptability across multiple databases. It can control multiple architecture models and adapt to multiple databases.” Zhang is confident in this project although this is the industry’s first “microservices architecture + domestic distributed database” implementation.

Kicking off emergency plans when unexpected situations are inevitable

In August 2020, Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank fully launched the system design and development work, pushing the project into the development stage.

With clear direction, the project development was carried out in full swing:

On 2020, October 12, the project completed data migration development and self-test as well as the commencement of data migration test work.

From 2020, November to 2021, June, multiple rounds of SIT testing and UAT testing were performed.

On 2021, June 18, the whole bank started production drills and entered the state of “combat”.

Everything was going well and the system launched was getting closer.

Unfortunately, the Nanjing epidemic broke out suddenly during this time. The original support staff from Sunline Nanjing R&D Center was unable to work on site due to the epidemic. The sudden accident brought great resistance and uncertainty to the project launch.

Project Manager Zhang urgently reported the situation to the headquarters. With Sunline’s 20 years of project experience, the mechanism of pre-risk assessment and establishment of risk plans for rapid response has kicked in. The headquarters immediately activated the emergency plan and urgently deployed personnel from the Shenzhen R&D center to support the project. The response plan was drafted out in 12 hours.

Successful launch and achieved seamless connection with domestic distributed databases

After more than 300 days and nights, Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank’s new core system project was finally ushered to the online testing stage on August 6. In order to ensure high-quality completion of the expected goal of production and launch, Sunline project team and more than 400 employees across the bank have undergone repeated preparations and drills, background data migration verification, counter green light verification, internal trial operation, external trial operation, etc.

Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank’s new-generation core system was successfully launched at 3:03 a.m. on August 8! The new generation transaction-level general ledger system and the new management accounting system by Sunline were also deployed simultaneously with the new core system.

After the core replacement, the bank achieved daily transaction volume of 100 million, number of concurrent transactions greater than 2000, transaction processing volume greater than 4000 transactions per second and the end-of-day batch reduced to 15 minutes. The performance far exceeds the original core system and it is in the lead among the same type of banks in the country!

Sunline project team group photo during the launching

What makes this new core unique is that it adopts the industry’s first “microservices architecture + domestic distributed database” to completely achieve seamless connection with domestic distributed databases, incorporate advanced technology concepts in the industry such as microservices, read-write separation and multi-source synchronization as well as split large systems into small microservices to reduce system complexity, eliminate coupling and effectively, solving the bottleneck issues of traditional centralized core, improving the high availability and dynamic expansion capabilities of the core system, greatly reducing the risk and cost of system construction, upgrade, operation and maintenance as well as achieving safety and control.

The new core provides strong driving force for digital transformation of Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank from two aspects:

1. System architecture that introduces digital technology to bring forth open microservices distributed architecture

– The product has strong scalability, elasticity as well as supports massive data and high concurrency

– Multi-center deployment and multi-active architecture to improve disaster tolerance

– The separation of historical query database from reading and writing through database multi-source synchronization, improving real-time transaction performance of the system

– Distributed database technology provides transaction consistency guarantee to ensure data integrity

2. Operation and maintenance capabilities with DevOps capabilities such as continuous construction, continuous release and deployment

–Automated continuous integration to improve delivery speed

-Test-driven development to improve agility

–Gray release capability which can realize smooth version upgrade

–The system supports graphical operation monitoring, automatic operation completion as well as maintenance management and control capabilities

The successful launch of the new generation core banking systems is a starting point for Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank driven by the Kunshan spirit. We await the excitement Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank will create on their road to digital transformation.

International Finance Magazine has announced the winners for 2021 International Finance Awards yesterday and Sunline was crowned the “Fastest Growing Fintech Company” under the Technology category, along with other technology companies globally. Winning this award further proofed the recognition of Sunline’s innovation and growth in the technology field.

International Finance is a leading premium business and finance magazine that addresses key economic and business developments issues to engage, inform and connect business leaders, decision makers, investors, and companies in key markets with factual content. The International Finance Awards recognize the contribution of companies in terms of ground-breaking initiatives and activities that benefits the global finance community as well as their outstanding performance in the respective fields. The nominations were identified by the International Finance research teams who are constantly on the lookout for new industry sectors and categories to best recognize quality works.

After processing the evaluation and reviewing companies globally under 11 categories, Sunline has been recognized as the fastest Fintech company with outstanding performance in terms of innovation and growth in the Technology category. In order to achieve the company’s vision to become the top global financial technology provider, Sunline has continuously reinvented their solutions with latest technology trends and industry best practices. Sunline became China’s first Fintech brand going international in 2016 and has successfully set a strong foothold in countries such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines.

The success of Sunline’s development stems from the company’s technology innovation strategy. Sunline continuously invest in research and development to keep up pace with the development of financial technologies, actively incorporate advanced technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, distributed architectures, etc. to their solutions, winning the trust of financial institutions in China and globally with the technology advancement and capabilities of its core business system and other financial technology solutions.

July 26 marks the go-live of Beijing Rural Commercial Bank’s new generation core system implemented by Sunline. Its technical capabilities and performance doubled and have become the new benchmark for China’s rural commercial banks core.

Beijing Rural Commercial Bank starts to shares their insights on their prosperity in technology

Beijing Rural Commercial Bank is the first provincial joint-stock rural commercial bank approved by the State Council. The bank’s basic financial services cover all the towns and villages in Beijing and its asset scale has exceeded RMB 1 trillion. In order to realize the bank’s IT strategy to comprehensively improve the bank’s service level and industry competitiveness, Beijing Rural Commercial Bank has proactively initiated the construction of a new generation core banking system to support its development and future proof its business.

The change of core is a huge project in the history of Beijing Rural Commercial Bank’s IT construction with the involvement of more than 110 systems. It is necessary to build the basic IT architecture and develop business function modules as well as complete high-quality data migration in a complex and huge legacy system to ensure business continuity. In summary, the scale, scope and difficulty of project construction were unprecedented.

After in-depth evaluation of many core system vendors from multiple dimensions such as product functions, technical architecture, system performance, and service capabilities, Beijing Rural Commercial Bank have made the decision to assign this arduous task to Sunline.

The high standards to build a benchmark for the core system of a rural commercial bank

The implementation of Beijing Rural Commercial Bank’s new core system project has officially begun in March 2020.

The core system refresh project is an important part of Beijing Rural Commercial Bank’s five-year development strategic plan. To enable the new core to truly empower business development and become a strong support for the new development pattern of the bank’s financial services, the key technology base must be advanced with higher performance than the industry standard.

“Our project team were faced with great pressure during that time. A lot of energy were involved to come out with an advanced technical architecture for this project. Moreover, with the high standard for the performance of the new core system in terms of day-to-day performance including a 30-minute final batch processing time and a 1-hour quarter-end final batch processing time, making this even more difficult.” Recalling the project situation at that time, Lu Gong, the project manager of Sunline.

The current day-to-day final batch processing time for the bank’s legacy core takes 1 hour and the quarter-end final batch processing time takes 2 hours, which means the new core will have to achieve double the performance compared to the legacy system. Hence, the difficulty is also doubled.

In order to help Beijing Rural Commercial Bank achieve the improvement with the new generation core system technology, Sunline sent R&D experts from the headquarters to communicate with the bank on the advanced needs of core technology. The project team members fully analyzed and sorted out the needs and characteristics of Beijing Rural Commercial Bank’s system. By putting forward a number of implementation plans, continuous communication, repeated optimization, Sunline’s project team finally established the best practice for the bank.

Despite the huge pressure, Lu was confident to deliver the projects smoothly. “Our technical architecture has always been leading the industry so we have full confidence. In terms of performance, apart from our experience of almost two decades, the quality of our solutions has also been verified by many customers. Based on the system construction experience, everyone finally found the most suitable solution. According to the characteristics of the bank’s data, the data was split and processed in advance before being optimized. Sure enough, after a period of tuning based on this program, the batch processing time was greatly reduced.”

After about 500 days of implementation, the new core system for Beijing Rural Commercial Bank has gone through the status reviews, requirements preparations, design and development, comprehensive testing, production drills and has finally reached online testing.

The successful launching of Beijing Rural Commercial Bank’s new core

On July 26, the new core system of Beijing Rural Commercial Bank was successfully put into production. After the launch, the concurrent processing capacity of the new core has increased to 12,000 transactions per second. The batch processing time on weekdays was shortened to less than 20 minutes and the interest was able to be settled at the end of the quarter. The day-end batch processing time has shortened to less than 30 minutes, taking only 12 minutes to complete the deduction of 1 million transactions, doubling the efficiency and completely solving the system bottleneck problem of Beijing Rural Commercial Bank’s social security agency and other large-scale agency services.

Group photo during the launching of Beijing Rural Commercial Bank’s new core

Sunline has built a new generation core system for Beijing Rural Commercial Bank with functional services, product modeling, interest rate marketization, business processing, refined management and architectural componentization in the areas of customer service, product management, business process and risk. Key links such as management and control have been empowered and upgraded to provide a strong engine for the new journey of the bank.

Excellent business performance achieved via the advanced capabilities of the core system:

1. Advanced technical architecture efficiently support the development of banking business and beyond

The new generation core system adopts an open technical architecture system which has good cross-platform and cross-database performance, meeting the deployment of localized X86 mainframes as well as greatly reduces hardware and subsequent maintenance costs.

At the same time, adopting Sunline’s own gateway service to solve the lightweight unified access and output of internal and peripheral applications provides interactive traffic management features (security, routing, authentication, current limiting, etc.), especially the gray-scale release mode of the program version which completely solves the security risk of the new version being fully online. Through the small-flow verification method, the problems in the product can be found, adjusted and optimized in the gray-scale stage and be iterated smoothly.

2. Business processing capabilities and efficiency have been greatly improved

The new generation core system realizes core capabilities such as flexible product configuration, rapid customization, differentiated customer pricing, unified channel support, multi-legal person support and refined data collection. It can provide banks with comprehensive channels and flexible operation support to help rapid product innovation, scientific risk management and comprehensive business processing capabilities improvement and efficiency, ultimately providing customers with better services.

During the implementation of the project, Sunline’s project team’s professional services, quick response to needs and ability to actively coordinate and promote the project have been praised by senior leaders of the bank for many times and Sunline have been rated as an excellent manufacturer by the industry for their outstanding performance.

The successful commissioning of the new generation core system has laid a solid foundation for Beijing Rural Commercial Bank’s future high-quality and sustainable development by strengthening the data empowerment, reshaping the financial service model and advancing the digital transformation of the bank’s business. In the past 20 years, Sunline has continued to lead the development of core systems with one benchmark project after another, accelerating the digital transformation of banks around the world.