Financial management has always played a major role in management control and resource allocation, being the top priority of corporate operations. Under the wave of digital transformation in the financial industry, financial management is facing a new round of change.

The transformation of digital financial intelligence in the financial industry has begun

In the past, financial management mainly focused on cost control and profit pursuit. With the continuous deepening of reformations such as interest rate marketization, financial institutions began to make use of digital technology to innovate traditional financial processes, improve resource allocation and refined management efficiency, enabling financial management to gradually surpass the role of optimizing management and control, allowing it to participate in business operation decision-making. These reformations have provided a continuous driving force for the transformation of financial management in financial institutions.

In the field of financial management, many large financial institutions have taken the lead:

– China Guangfa Bank realized smart auditing of fees through the use of big data in its compliance mechanism

– Ping An Bank introduced invoice OCR recognition technology to provide employees with intelligent reimbursement services

– Hua Xia Bank broke the barriers between multiple systems and realizes data sharing through the integration of the sources of business expenses.

The transformation of intelligent digital financial management field is trending in the financial industry but financial institutions and financial technology service providers are continuously exploring to determine the aspects of transformation.

Empowering the transformation of intelligent digital financial management

Sunline has accumulated a wealth of experiences in this field, successfully providing financial management information system services for nearly 40 financial customers such as Zhejiang Rural Credit, Shandong Rural Credit, Liaoning Rural Credit and Bank of Shanghai as well as major banks such as Ping An Bank, Hua Xia Bank and China Guangfa Bank, accumulating deep insights of the business logic and development direction of financial management systems.

Sunline believes that the core of intelligent digital financial management transformation lies in emphasizing the quantity and quality of data, integration of industry and finance as well as applying automated and intelligent technologies to achieve the goal of resource efficiency, strengthening risk control and new value creation. With this, Sunline launched a new generation financial management platform based on the design concepts of digitalization, intelligence, mobility, ecosystem and industry-finance integration. With four major advantages, the new generation financial management will help financial institutions accelerate intelligent digital financial management.

“Four-in-one” smart reimbursement

“Four-in-one” refers to the realization intelligent online “invoice imaging + data structuring + risk control review + automated form filling” from cumbersome offline reimbursement.

The platform has built-in rich risk control rule and form filling models. Through the accumulation of data, machine learning algorithms are used to serve decision-making to improve the risk control rule model and improve fraud risk discrimination in order to minimize employee reimbursement time, reduce employee advance cycle and ultimately improve business approval efficiency.

Applicable scenarios: Reimbursement for employees such as travel expenses, hospitalization expenses, etc.

To submit a reimbursement receipt, employees only need to take an image of the original invoice through a mobile phone or a scanner and the system will perform intelligent OCR recognition and synchronize the four-in-one processing to realize ” reimbursement with image”.

Scenario-based expense management through the integration of industry and finance

Integrate business development with financial management, conduct scenario-based planning for various expenses associated with the main business and incorporation of management goals for various expenses into the rules and regulations, realizing the full life cycle intelligent management of expenses to improve integration capabilities, avoid information silo as well as provide high-value data for cost and expense analysis through the integration of industry and finance. Scenario-based financial management and control based on the integration of industry and finance has become a key requirement of large commercial banks in recent years.

Applicable scenarios: Centralizing litigation fees, advertising fees, capital expenditures and other specific department expenses.

Centralization of management of case records of litigation costs, advance processing, court judgments, recovery payments, and advance write-offs.

Create a closed loop budget management through the integration of the entire budget process

Through financial models and methods, the financial management platform analyzes strategy, formulates business goals, provides evaluation basis and financial resource allocation plan, guides, encourages and restricts business activities accordingly to realize the closed loop budget management and solving the problem of information silos, link budget with strategy and business plans, realize multi-level and multi-dimensional budget analysis as well as apply rolling budget and calculation tools to empower each management level and achieve hierarchical control.

Applicable scenario: project expenditure budget

During actual project implementation, purchase behaviors will be initiated for each project. When the contract is signed, the reimbursement behavior is initiated based on invoices, orders, etc. During the process, frozen, released and used project budget and financial budget will be analyzed. The data will also used to assess the degree of budget deviation and provide data support for the next year’s budget planning.

Intelligent financial analysis provide decision making and analysis support for all levels

Capitalize massive amounts of data to build a multi-dimensional, multi-form, high-performance and financial-integrated visual analysis platform to realize intelligent financial analysis and provide decision-making, compliance monitoring as well as cost and expense forecast reporting for all levels.

Applicable scenarios: reimbursement behavior analysis, overall expense analysis, etc.

For example, the risk control traversal review of each invoice and document is conducted based on intelligent risk control model. A risk control trace report is formed and normal behavior, suspected violations or clear violations are recorded in employee behavior attribute tags. The platform will integrate and analyze the above information and use machine learning algorithms to build employee reimbursement behavior profiles and credit scores. Based on different score segments, differentiated reimbursements such as disapproved reimbursement, deferred reimbursement and ranking display can be realized.

With the current situation, digital economy will have a long-term and far-reaching impact on financial processes and overall business. Under the opportunities of the times, Sunline has always been professional and innovative to continuously promote the transformation of financial operations and management models, making finance truly a continuous internal driving force for the transformation of financial institutions.

With the surging digital wave of the financial industry in recent years, new technologies represented by big data, cloud computing, blockchain, artificial intelligence, etc. are reshaping and promoting the depth of digital transformation in various financial segments.

Digital transformation has rooted deep in the credit card field

As the banking business sector with the most profound digital genes and innovative capabilities, bank’s credit card business making full use of the rich accumulated customer data, data-driven decision-making and refined operations have become mainstream, adopting digital initiatives ranging from core refresh to iterative upgrade of their applications. Digitization has penetrated into all aspects of the credit card business especially in terms of smart risk control.

Credit cards was very sought after due to its flexibilities and advantages associated with the consumption habits of consumers that are advancing with times. Due to the trend of contactless payments in the post-Covid era, credit cards have slowly become the “weapon” for retail transformation of various financial institutions. This is shown by the accelerated introduction of digital credit cards by both large state-owned banks and joint-stock banks since 2020 as well as the digitization of the entire supply chain including card issuance, management and security applications.

In August 31, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China, Construction Bank, Bank of Communications, Postal Savings Bank, China CITIC Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank and others have jointly launched an innovative digital UnionPay Unbounded Card and in September 25, China CITIC Bank, China UnionPay and Huawei Wallet jointly launched a special digital bank card.

Digital credit cards have undoubtedly becoming a new trend in payment

New challenges of credit card core system

While major banks are seizing new heights for the development of digital credit cards, the technological changes surrounding digital credit card initiatives are becoming more imminent. Hence, the refresh of the credit card core system, the “heart” of the overall credit card business is the essence in providing non- stop services to cardholders.

The prevalence of digital credit cards poses new challenges to the banks’ credit card core system at different levels:

–    Architectural level

An enterprise-level microservices and distributed technology architecture can greatly improve the reusability of functional modules and increase the speed of docking. Field segmentation is performed on the basis of maintaining stability and efficiency with the support of loose coupling between fields, easy expansion within the field as well as enabling centralized parameter management and operations.

–   Business level

A service-oriented system that provides support based on business areas rather than software system structure that focuses on users with the improved customer insights and providing services based on user journey. Product pricing is refined to the scenario level, marketing activities are differentiated according to different dimensions and services are refined through smart risk management and control capabilities. The componentized and configurable business strategies, product factories can quickly release new products. Large operating platforms support full-platform operations and flexible deployment of business resources enable services available 24×7.

–   Data level

Through data-driven business processes, real-time data is used to support decision-making at all levels and achieve real-time decision-making. Customer segmentation based on digital insights promote and increase the scale of interest-bearing assets while event-driven streaming services provide multiple customer services via a single touch. Operation and maintenance monitoring and operation data actively reveal operation hotspots, allowing administrators at all levels to understand the front-line situation in real time, allowing decision making and resources allocation efficiently.

The ability of the credit card business to achieve smooth operation depends greatly on the “vitality and health” of the credit card core.

Sunline pioneers the credit card core refresh

As a service provider focusing on the core banking field for nearly two decades, Sunline has opened up new horizons for the credit card core system with innovative technologies and service models, reshaping the traditional financial ecosystem.

With a professional implementation team and rich practical experiences, Sunline has become the preferred core credit card service provider for many major domestic banks in China. In the credit card core refresh project for Bank of Communications, Sunline was responsible for the construction of the system architecture design, authorization processing, card issuance and real-time reduction of the core. Apart from that, Sunline has also created the industry credit card core benchmark projects for China CITIC Bank and Ping An Bank.

Aiming at the new trends of digital credit cards, Sunline’s credit card core system is based on the design concept of data-driven and domain separation with advanced features:

1. Distributed microservice design based on enterprise-level architecture, modularized business capabilities, configuration deployment and online services.

2. Business processing abstraction according to logical units with processing flow and path determined by the data itself with the routing rules supporting the configuration of the rule engine.

3. The batch business process can be restructured based on requirements.

4. The unitized architecture supports gray release, A/B testing for business decision-making of homogeneous customer groups as well as business optimization and iteration.

5. The operation module, parameter module and business capability module are separated with independent role and authority system. Operation page is separated from the business logic and unified management of the operation platform is supported.

6. Integrated design of credit card and credit to support multi-format integration.

As the major banks in China are accelerating their efforts to transform to retail finance, the credit card business being the top priority of retail business will inevitably gain a growth rate that surpasses other financial businesses. Hence, credit card core system will inevitably enter a new round of upgrading and transformation cycle.

With the opportunities arising in the digital age, Sunline has always adhered to innovation and professionalism in exploring new paths for financial technology to empower business development and developing a digital financial ecosystem with the power of China’s financial technology.

In 2020, Sunline’s core, big data, management and other businesses have supported many major banks, displaying the strength of unified technology platform and development framework through the remarkable developments in these banks.

As Fintech accelerated the pace of retail transformation in commercial banks, more banks regard credit card core as the key in retail transformation and using technology to empower, meet compliance, increase efficient and innovate the domestic development of credit card businesses has become the main focus of the industry.

Credit Card Core Transformation for Large Banks

Banks are more competitive with the refined operation capabilities supported by digital financial technologies. With financial technology being able to reshape bank’s credit card services, the credit card core transformation for large banks becomes more advanced:

·    On October 2019, CITIC Bank’s StarCard Credit Card Core was successfully put into production.

·    On August 2020, Bank of Communications open tender for its Pacific Credit Card Center Project.

·    On October 2020, Ping An Bank’s “A+” Credit Card Core System was fully upgraded and replaced.

Both the core systems of CITIC and Ping An’s Credit Card Business have shown extraordinary strengths:

CITIC Bank’s new StarCard Credit Card Core has been operating stably as of 2020, successfully hosting the operations and managements of 110,000,000 accounts with a peak transaction value of 4,500 transactions per second, more than three times efficiency compared to the original system.

Ping An Bank’s “A+” Credit Card Core System has also achieved excellent transcript. As of the end of 2020, the number of Ping An Bank’s credit cards in circulation reached 64,245,100 with an increase of 6.5% as compared to the previous year. The total credit card transaction value hit RMB 3,454,021 billion, marking a 3.5% year-on-year increase.

Under the demonstration effect of these pioneers, credit card core construction and transformation has become the key focus point of the big bank’s competition for retail.

Leading a new round of change in the credit card core system with technologies

The above-mentioned banks all chose Sunline as their preferred partner to support their credit card core construction and transformation. For Bank of Communications’ Credit Card Core Project, Sunline is responsible for the construction of important functions such as system architecture design, authorization processing, card issuance and real-time reduction. At the same time, Sunline has created the industry’s benchmark projects for both China CITIC Bank and Ping An Bank.

Sunline has always insisted on independent research and development while being at the forefront of the industry in terms of credit card core technology and innovation:

·    Launched the first JAVA based credit card core system in 2012.

·    Launched the first modular and distributed credit card core system in 2015.

·    Launched the first microservices architecture credit card core system in 2017.

·    In 2021, Sunline introduced domain-driven design (DDD) into the credit card core for the first time, building a large-scale operation system from a business perspective.

Sunline believes that the new generation digital credit card core system should be user-centric, business-oriented, highly available with digital as the soul. It should be a safe, autonomous and reliable open platform.

LTTS-Suncard, the digital credit card core is self-developed, with unitized and distributed technical level that uses microservices as the application design standard and adopts open platform technology to effectively support credit card business scenarios, openness and business integration.

With the technological innovations, two major breakthroughs have been achieved at business level:

·    Data-driven business decision-making by making full use of the data value.

·    Low-code concept empowers business agility with the replacement of manual coding by configuring rules and parameters to quickly realize business innovation and adjustment.

The new generation credit card core system is based on the basic of microservices and establishes a variety of independent and collaborative product centers, pricing centers, quota centers, authorization centers, accounting centers, operation centers, user centers, etc. to carry out product innovation and centralized business operations that effectively support the rapid development of the bank’s credit card business from multiple levels.

In the application design of Ping An Bank’s “A+” Credit Card Core System, the advanced designs has fully integrated the related innovative functions into the bank’s credit card field authorization center, quota center and card issuance center, making the Ping An Bank’s new “A+” core the lead in the industry.

With the achievements after the launching of the credit card core systems for multiple banks, the new system has achieved a geometrical leap in terms of customer service, conversion rate, response efficiency towards market demand and innovation efficacy, creating more value for the banking business.

·    Business product innovation and rapid iteration capability shortened from monthly to weekly timeline, supporting 1 billion-level card issuance, billion-level account processing, billion-level daily active customers and unrestricted expansion.

·    Internet-level financial service capabilities including real-time efficient services that enhance the business processing efficiency of operational services and greatly improve customer experience. At the same time, real-time decision-making and active transaction warning can effectively prevent potential transaction fraud and risks from various open scenarios, ensuring secure digital services.

·    Rich transaction elements and pricing strategies drive each link in the transaction chain through data, refining management accuracy, improving management timeliness as well as providing intelligent decision-making for seamless operations and managements. Services are refined from the card product level (logo level) to the scenario level with flexible management and control, differentiated pricing, refined services and risk control capabilities, ultimately realizing iterative evolution of business strategies based on data to make business more agile.

Professional services guaranteeing results in every customer project

Rich practical experience and professional service capabilities are the reasons why Sunline is favored by large banks.

Sunline started it business from core banking field and has been deeply involved in the field for almost two decades, transforming the core for nearly 100 banks including state-owned and policy banks, joint-stock banks, large and medium-sized city commercial banks, provincial rural credit banks, rural commercial banks and overseas banks with unmatched technology, professional services and actual implementation experience in the industry.

While focusing on the financial field, technology innovation and providing professional services to banking customers, Sunline has an army with strong technology, rich experience and deep business understanding:

·    Professionals in the credit card field in China and overseas with a delivery team of more than 500 people.

·    Industry experts with more than a decade of experience among the teams of analysis designers, development engineers, test engineers, etc.

·    Dozens of experts led the design, research and development of the credit card core system architecture for many major banks.

Sunline Credit Card Core Team

The dedicated team provides banks with comprehensive professional credit card core solutions and services, empowering the development of bank’s credit card business.

With the retail transformation of banks, the core construction of bank credit cards is also accelerating. Sunline takes advantage of its self-developed technology to focus on the core construction of a new generation credit card core, empowering banks to enhance their competitiveness in retail transformation with professional services.

At present, the system development of most financial institutions is still in the manual coding stage with silo business lines performing their own duties using different development frameworks and different data development languages. Information cannot be shared and exchanged, resulting in a large number of development resources waste and low efficiency.

In the fierce competition in the financial industry, customer experience is essential and efficiency is paramount. Traditional development models have become a limiting factor in enhancing competitiveness while reducing development costs, improving efficiency, agility, realizing ease of use and scalability have become the industry’s primary focus.

It’s great to have such a data development platform

Based on years of experience in the construction and implementation of financial big data platforms and data warehouses, Sunline has refined and integrated a set of advanced data development platforms to provide complete construction of enterprises big data platforms, auxiliary development functions and information retrieval components for data warehouses, reducing the repetitive tasks of R&D personnel while realizing rapid data development and ensuring the quality of development to respond to the needs of business scenarios for data. Sunline’s big data platforms have been implemented in many banks.

In the ETL development process of data projects, the use of the data development platform exceeds 5 times efficiency compared to manual coding.

The data development platform puts forward the requirements for batch development, process standardization, visualization of operation and ease of maintenance for the processing of ETL processes. It provides full-process management of data development based on mainstream database products and big data platform products, helping companies realize the foundation of data platform while at the same time cooperates with the rich data asset catalog, operation monitoring chart, data encyclopedia and other visual retrieval functions to ensure the sustainable development of the data platform construction.

Fully empowering data development with efficiency

Summarizing the role of Sunline’s self-researched data development platform:

• Multi-function

The data development platform can realize a series of data development tasks such as data synchronization, creation, release, scheduling, operation and maintenance to provide customers with one-stop design, development, testing, maintenance and other functions.

• Efficient

The data development platform has a wealth of development methods, supports interface operation and batch import development functions. Process wizard is simple and easy to operate and realizes rapid development of requirements. The ETL development process exceeds 5 times efficiency compared to manual coding.

• Good quality

The data development platform is developed in a standardized process with more standardized and unified code which greatly improves the readability and maintainability of the code, ultimately guarantying data scripts code.

Less time, effort and cost

The data development platform provides a complete set of data processing with full process control which can be connected to the commonly used scheduling tools in the industry to complete the scheduling configuration work. The ETL development process is templated to reduce the coding workload and implementation time to greatly reduce the workload of developers and system integration. Invest.

The improvement of the bank’s data development efficiency is not only the actual demand but also the preemptive factor to win the future in the comprehensive digital transformation of the bank. Sunline’s data development platform understands the needs of enterprises and realizes easier and faster development, ultimately help enterprises accelerate the process of financial digitization.

Sunline’s new generation intelligent bank marketing platform offers real-time computing of the entire process from transaction and customer screening to channel distribution, efficiently realizing the upgrade from T+1 marketing to T+0 real-time marketing. At present, the system has been implemented in many banks such as China Merchants Bank, Ping An Bank, Construction Bank, Ningbo Bank, Zhengzhou Bank, Guiyang Bank, Changsha Bank, Huishang Bank, Jiangnan Rural Commercial Bank, Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank, etc.

The platform uses big data technology to achieve a flexible and extensible architecture, realizing the seamless management of the entire marketing process. The system can effectively support, manage and supervise banks’ marketing activities with the ability to package marketing scenarios that provide a full set of visualizations for banks in each package scenario and configure templates to realize the individual requirements of flexible operation and one-click deployment to ultimately achieve the streamlining and unification of marketing activities management and customer lifecycle management.

Helping the bank truly realize data-driven precision marketing model from “fragmented marketing” to “omni-channel marketing”, Sunline’s new generation intelligent bank marketing platform and fully improves the efficiency of financial marketing services, reduces the cost of traffic drive and increases customer conversion rate.

How Does the Intelligent Bank Marketing Platform Plays a Role for Banks?

1. A variety of derivation methods to quickly discover and identify high-value customers

The new generation intelligent bank marketing platform supports a variety of derivation methods that can handle off the shelf categories. Commonly used high-frequency category are deposited as boutique labels and reused directly in the platform to avoid repeated configuration.

When a bank lacks a category system, the large amount of information from customers cannot be transmitted to the front desk in a timely manner. It is difficult for bank account managers to grasp key marketing opportunities, resulting in serious capital loss of the bank. 80% of c-terminal retail customers eventually become low-value customers. Through the new generation intelligent bank marketing platform, the establishment of categories can be established to build 360⁰ user profile to effectively and efficiently discover and identify high-value potential customers.

 

2. Improve key indicators and operational efficiency through multi-level customer screening

The new generation intelligent bank marketing platform can design multi-level and multi-groups for up to 10 campaigns according to the specific business needs of the bank’s marketing activities, filter audiences through customer categories, achieve fine division of target groups and improve key indicators and operational efficiency.

In the scenario of pushing increasing interest coupons to real-time incoming customers, the system filters out the audience through multiple levels of c-end customer categories and pushes different products to suite each category. If the c-end customer does not receive it within 5 hours, the system will automatically push a message reminder, greatly improving the efficiency of bank operations.

3. The configuration of activities, channels, gifts and interests with seamless templates integration to quickly complete marketing tasks

The new generation intelligent bank marketing platform supports multi-channel integration including SMS, outbound calls, APP, WeChat official accounts, etc., through the setting of fields, recommendation strategies and product strategies to achieve the personalized configuration of channels for thousands of people. In terms of docking methods, the platform also supports active push and API passive query. At the same time, multiple scenarios encapsulated by the platform provide a full set of configuration templates to meet the personalized needs of business departments for one-click deployment and help bank business departments to quickly complete marketing tasks.

The system can customize marketing activities according to different customer groups. For the white-collar customer category with a small investment amount, it will push stable and fixed income products into a product package while for game enthusiast customer category, it will push exclusive gaming credit cards and equipment gifts.

4. Real-time respond to customer needs

Each functional module of the new generation intelligent bank marketing platform can return the configuration results in real time after clicking release. Business personnel can complete all the configuration of marketing activities through one interface. With the marketing model and recommendation model, qualified users can be included in the active customer group in real time while rewards will be given to qualified users who participate in activities immediately.

When c-terminal users use mobile banking APP or online banking to do loan calculators, the system can push loan products in seconds and if they complete a specific task, they will immediately receive corresponding rewards.

5. Scalable data structure to maximize the value of data

The data structure of the new generation intelligent bank marketing platform has a high degree of flexibility and scalability while the architecture can be expanded to easily cope with tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of data. The platform has open interfaces which can accept raw data externally. The processed customer profiling data is output to an external system and the customer category can be flexibly exchanged with other systems to meet the bank’s demand for maximizing the value of the data.

Sunline’s new generation intelligent bank marketing platform can provide customers with a  truly scenario-based, personalized and diversified financial services, enabling banks to accurately grasp customer needs, respond to market changes in a timely manner, improve service efficiency and take the lead in the digital marketing transformation of the banking industry.

For the longest time, most databases used by banks and financial institutions in China are Western based Sybase, Oracle and IBM DB2. In the context of international tensions and increasingly fierce technological competition, information technology innovation to solve the bottleneck problems of core technologies has become a national issue. With the support of distributed, cloud services, microservices and other innovative technologies, Chinese Financial Technology companies and financial institutions are actively responding to the national call to jump the bandwagon especially in the field of domestic database substitution.

Under the innovation driven wave, domestic database field has thrived with the emergence of a number of domestic database products such as Tencent TDSQL, Huawei GaussDB, ZTE GoldenDB, Wuhan Dameng, Yijingjie, etc., successfully empowering multiple industries with multi-scenario verifications. However, the application of domestic databases in the financial industry especially for banks are extremely rare due to the high-performance requirements for transaction databases, the imperfect ecosystem of domestic databases, the lack of application cases and the risk associated with all the parties who participate in the building of a banking system based on a domestic database.

As a financial technology leader in the core banking system field, Sunline have always actively responded to the call for the independent innovation of information technology, leading to the development of deposit and loan core system, digital core system, credit card core system as well as transaction core system for banks. With the use of a same set of structured distributed technology platform, these systems support cross-platform and cross-database as well as data access layer encapsulation to realize an open and consistent business system database and shielding the different SQL syntax details of different domestic databases, allowing seamless connection of various domestic databases usage.

In recent years, Sunline has joined forces with various domestic database suppliers and customers to build an ecosystem and gradually realize the replacement of domestic databases, realizing China’s solid steps in advancing the country’s IT independence strategy.

WeBank takes the lead in adopting domestic database for its digital core

WeBank, China’s first private bank and fully digital bank was established in 2014, with hundreds of millions of QQ users and WeChat users as their target customers. Hence, WeBank’s core system has a requirement to support at least 500 million customer capacity while at the same time having to meet the safety and control requirements as well as the ability to adopt Tencent’s self-developed TDSQL database based on an open-source system.

500 million customers were an astronomical figure at that time and the legacy core banking systems based on traditional architecture could never be scaled to meet the design requirements of a distributed system within a short period of time. Moreover, MySQL database were rare in the banking industry the mainstream choice was Oracle database.

In light of WeBank’s requirements, many technology vendors withdrew from the POC within one week. However, the POC team of Sunline successfully completed the docking of MySQL database in only a week’s time with the cross-platform, cross-database and other forward-looking design concepts of Sunline’s independently developed Java based core banking system, doubling the confidence of WeBank to partner with Sunline as the partner for the bank’s core banking system.

The core system implementation tool almost a year and in March 2015, WeBank’s core banking system was launched. Using domestic TDSQL database, the bank’s core realizes horizontal expansion of its processing capacity, supports distributed technology architecture for massive data and completely guarantees the operation of the system from the technical level. With high efficiency and stability, the system become the first domestic distributed core banking system to remove IOE and has become a solid benchmark for domestic database applications in the financial industry.

Hubei Bank introduced the first large-scale domestic general relational database into the core system

With the courage to innovate, Hubei Bank new core uses Sunline’s distributed core banking system to carry a large-scale domestic general relational database, Dameng SQL database. Through the bank’s key business scenario support, data service support test and database migration verification, Oracle database and the domestic database were heterogeneously integrated in the core key businesses, verifying the feasibility of replacing the foreign commercial database platform within the core banking system.

In May 2019, the new core of Hubei Bank was successfully put into production. The system uses object-oriented JAVA language to implement all business logic processing to completely and effectively support the system’s cross-platform and database independence, realizing horizontal expansion of various relational databases, middleware and hardware platforms to provider standard financial services with consistent channels.

Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank took the lead in adopting a domestic database in the core system of traditional banks

At the beginning of 2018, Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank was facing internal and external factors of information security strategy as well as the need for legacy core replacement, the bank began to explore the feasibility of domestic distributed database solutions and exchanged experience with WeBank. After an organizational inspection, POC testing and the architecture high-availability test, Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank finally decided to adopt Sunline’s distributed banking core banking system with Tencent TDSQL database.

At that time, there was no precedent for the domestic replacement of the bank’s core banking system database in traditional banks. Therefore, many challenges have been encountered during the implementation of the new core system project for Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank. The most critical one was the compatibility of the domestic distributed database with the core system.

TDSQL distributed database was quite different from traditional centralized database in terms of characteristics. For example, when a centralized database is adopted, the data is concentrated in one node. When implementing certain functions, SQL was more complicated. In order to adapt to the characteristics of the distributed database, Sunline and the bank spent a lot of time in the early stage to adapt the platform and business layer code until the system performance after the transformation is completely comparable to that of Oracle.

On August 18, 2019, Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank’s new core system using domestic databases was put into production and operated efficiently and in a stable manner, fully realizing the replacement of AIX operating system, Sybase database with Linux operating system, TDSQL database and X86 server as well as marking China’s first traditional commercial bank core banking system to successfully adopt a distributed domestic database to replace foreign database.

China CITIC Bank takes the lead in adopting domestic databases in the credit card core system

In recent years with the rapid growth of credit card business volume, CITIC Bank Credit Card Business has begun to explore more advanced business systems to build a solution that completely solve the capacity and functional limitation with only one upgrade. After thorough investigation and demonstration, the CITIC Bank Credit Card decided to build the first “domestic server + domestic database + domestic software” for the bank’s credit card core and was the partner of choice in the construction of this important project.

After more than two years of technical research and development, the StarCard core system of CITIC Bank Credit Card Business was successfully put into production on October 26, 2019. The online database uses the ZTE GoldenDB database that adopts a distributed cluster (HBASE+ES+HIVE) solution with PB-level data storage capabilities, real-time query massive data with second-level delay and data penetration capabilities for horizontal correlation in different scenarios to provide data service capabilities of different timeliness and complex scenarios for the card center customer service, marketing support, product service, credit risk, operation support and other lines. The “Double 11” test came soon after the StarCard system was launched. In the early morning of the same day, the online credit card transaction volume exceeded RMB 100 million in only 2 minutes and exceeded RMB 1 billion within one hour. The transaction processing speed has increased by three times with proven stability and advancement in actual data.

Ping An Credit Card Business realizes the successful docking of a new “A+” core and domestic database

Since the launch of Ping An Bank’s retail transformation strategy, the traditional technology system has become increasingly difficult to meet the needs of Ping An’s credit card business in terms of agile innovation and user diversification. In order to achieve a true cost reduction and efficiency increase as well as to build a core with 100% independent intellectual property rights, Ping An Bank Credit Card Business and Sunline officially launched the bank’s new “A+” credit card core project using Tencent’s TDSQL database in December 2018, opening the prelude to “decomputerization”.

The new “A+” core system maximizes the advanced design and related functions of Sunline’s core system in the credit card authorization center, quota center and card issuing center application design. It uses Tencent’s TDSQL database to achieve multiple technical indicators in the credit card system. The deployment of the new “A+” credit card core creates a benchmark for China’s credit card core refresh.

Looking back at these breakthrough projects, a group of people who dare to be innovative has open the door to allow the emergence of China’s domestic database in the banking field, showing the improvement of domestic databases capabilities day by day to more efficiently meet the needs of banks in multiple business scenarios and be more relevant.

The continuous efforts of Sunline’s ecological builders of localized databases such as Sunline, WeBank, Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank, China CITIC Bank, Ping An Bank, Tencent, etc. to establish a 0 to 1 domestic database replacement for China’s banking industry has established many industry benchmarks and provided important practical paths and reference significance for other banks in different scales and different stages of digital transformation to realize the domestic replacement of databases.

Domestic technological innovations are reflected in the field of financial technology, which is to look at the financial credit creation work from the height of the industrial chain and supply chain. In the future, as a firm supporter and practitioner of the national credit and innovation strategy, Sunline will give full play to its advantages in independent, security and controllable core systems to actively promote cooperation with domestic upstream and downstream enterprises to jointly build a domestic financial ecosystem that will promote the information security and controllable process of China’s banking industry as well as to export this ability to the overseas markets and allow Chinese financial technology to reach a global influence.

The importance of risk control management is as depicted by the 2018 China Smart Risk Control Research Report by Equal Ocean, as the “core of financial activities”.

As the development of China’s financial industry is showing strong credit-driven attributes, the current risk control links between traditional financial institutions and digital consumer finance companies are still facing widespread problems such as information asymmetry, high costs, poor timeliness and low efficiency. The legacy risk control measures are unable to meet the credit growth triggered by strong personal consumption and the spike in user’s loan demand.

With the continuous improvement of the digitalization of the financial industry, its natural “digital attributes” and the development of big data technology have provided an excellent foundation for the intelligent transformation of finance. The intelligent risk control platform empowered by big data has gradually become the preferred choice for risk management.

How to realize smart risk control?

If you compare the process of financial risk control management to creating an exquisite a dish, then there must be a professional chef to control the entire process from raw material procurement, processing to dish output.

In this case, Smart Risk Control Middleware is the chef. Let’s see how he makes this dish with delicious flavors and flavors:

The chef will first collect internal data, external data, structured/unstructured and other risk control data through the big data platform to aggregate and manage all kinds of raw materials for cooking. Then add flavors such as risk indicators, label analysis, risk model strategies (anti-fraud strategies, access strategies, scoring strategies and post-loan early warning strategies) to process these data and raw materials, accurately control the heat and use pre-loan approval and loan risk control in the whole process such as monitoring and post-loan collection.

The smart operation finally realizes the closed loop of risk management of anti-fraud identification, admission judgment, comprehensive scoring, post-loan early warning and collection for customers in the entire credit process and provides customers with intelligent risk control dishes that best suit their tastes.

What unique skills does the “chef” of Sunline have?

Sunline Intelligent Risk Control Center is an experienced chef who has served customers such as Postal Savings Bank, Dalian Bank, Jiujiang Bank, Chongqing Rural Commercial Bank, Chongqing Bank and Yunnan Hongta Bank, among which Dalian Bank’s Intelligent Risk Control won the 2020 China Financial Technology Innovation Competition Gold Award. At the same time, Intelligent Risk Control Center have also won numerous awards including Top 10 Excellent Solution Recommended by Financial Data Intelligence Experts, Excellent Solution for Financial Data Intelligent Risk Control Innovation and Top 10 Excellent Solution for Financial Data Intelligent Network Influence in 2020 among other honors:

1. Data ability – Configuring raw materials

In addition to enhancing data collection capabilities and data storage integration capabilities, Sunline Intelligent Risk Control Center focuses on training data computing capabilities, comprehensively optimizing and upgrading long-term, high-latitude data processing capabilities so as to quickly output high-quality data raw materials to meet judgment and decision-making need.

2. Technical ability – Cooking the perfect dish

Sunline Intelligent Risk Control Center uses artificial intelligence technology, innovates computing capabilities, supports complex algorithms, stream computing, response time, high concurrency, etc., and realizes the core tool products innovative upgrade of the risk control decision-making engine.

3. Business ability – Plating the innovative dishes

In addition to supporting business scenarios for closed-loop risk control of the entire credit process, Sunline intelligent risk control center also supports customer-defined early warning scenario settings, custom model scenario settings, multi-dimensional analysis, single-dimensional attribution analysis and other functions to effectively meet the multiple needs of users in different industries and at different levels.

Sunline Intelligent Risk Control Center empowers financial risk control with its innovation and professionalism. With the empowerment of this “chef”, the restricted management, cost, income and profitability of the credit business development of financial institutions will be solved. Risks and other issues can be quickly controlled or resolved and the risk management of the entire life cycle of credit is truly realized.

The intelligent risk control center will not only help financial companies make correct business decisions, but also protect the safety and integrity of assets, ultimately achieving business goals and further promote the intelligent transformation and development of financial companies in the Internet era.

In the past ten years, the financial market environment in China has undergone earth-shaking changes. With the stabilization of the domestic economy and the acceleration process of interest rate marketization of China, digital finance has also developed vigorously. At the same time, as emerging technologies continue to mature, the financial scene has also accelerated. The integration of technologies by banks brought about by profound changes in the economic environment, market competition environment and customer needs has also created new opportunities and challenges to the development of the banking industry and banking information systems.

As the engine of a bank’s business information processing, core system is the most critical link in the bank’s IT system. In the continuous development in banks’ information system, core banking system started from a stand-alone business system (1980s – 1990s) that could only handle the business of a single branch. After a large data concentration (late 20th century – 2008), a thin core (2008 – 2014) and is now ushered in the development overflight and has entered the distributed era.

What is the core banking system development in the past ten years?

The prelude to the distributed era: The implementation of the first-generation JAVA core banking system

In the era of large data concentration due to the enhancement of host capabilities and network capabilities, ‘big core’ is a common form of core business systems. The development of various peripheral businesses and sharp increase in business volume year by year has ushered banks into the ’thin core’ era, stripping various professional and characteristic business systems from the core business systems to optimize the design of the core, causing the creation of a large number of peripheral systems.

The disadvantages of ‘pipe development’ brought about by large-scale concentration are particularly obvious in ‘thin core’ form. A large number of peripheral systems often develop to independent applications, leading to inconsistent data, uncoordinated functions and ultimately unsatisfactory customer experience leading to the exploration and practice of a new generation of core banking system.

Before 2010, the mainstream development language for core banking systems was COBOL, C language or database stored procedures on mainframes. At that time, Sunline judged that JAVA language is inherently cross-platform and can support internet services. Once JAVA based core banking system is successfully developed, it will solve a series of pain points faced by the core banking system. It is based on this judgement that Sunline become the first to develop a JAVA based core system. In 2010, the prototype development was completed and special tests were conducted in the IBM Beijing Laboratory. The test results were very satisfactory and were highly praised by the IBM Laboratory.

In 2011, the first generation JAVA core system in China’s banking industry were ushered into landing opportunity. At that time, Hengfeng Bank needed to refactor their core system and inclined towards JAVA. With the two sides hitting it off and after two years of construction, Sunline’s JAVA based core banking system was successfully put into production for Hengfeng Bank in 2013, becoming China’s first domestic JAVA core system in production. 

The beginning of the distributed era: The landing of the first distributed core system

The JAVA based core banking system solves the problems caused by ‘pipe development’ to a certain extent and had made progress business wise but on technology wise, banks’ core systems were still built on imported servers. Under the traditional IT technology architecture development model of banks at that time, the ‘mainframe + X86’ hybrid architecture still failed to make a breakthrough. In the digital field, distributed architecture based on pure X86 servers has developed rapidly.

In 2014, the historical breakthrough opportunity came when China’s first private full digital bank, WeBank was established. With the internet gene of Tencent, the target customers are hundreds of millions of QQ users and WeChat users. Therefore, WeBank proposes a distributed core system with a requirement to support 500 million customer capacity and system support with flexible expansion.

500 million was an astronomical number at the time and legacy core business system based on the traditional architecture cannot be adjusted to meet the design requirements of the distributed system in a short time. In this competition, many vendors participating in the POC withdrew within one week but as Sunline’s core banking system met all the expectations of WeBank. At that time, WeBank requested the connection of MySQL databases that are mainly used in Internet companies which is rarely used in the banking industry. Before, Sunline was mainly developed based on Oracle databases. However, Sunline’s POC team only used one week to complete MySQL docking work which fully benefited from the cross-platform and cross-database forward-looking design of Sunline’s JAVA based core system. The successful connection of MySQL database has doubled the confidence of WeBank to partner with Sunline in building a distributed core system.

“We’ve crossed the river by feeling the stones beneath,” Li Gong, the technical engineer of Sunline who was in charge of the docking at the time recalled. “Before the construction started, we have spent a lot of time designing the business plan and technical framework within the industry. After everything was in place, construction began. Even so, various difficulties were encountered during the development process. Since the industry has no experience to learn from, we can only take one step at a time in the development process of distributed transactions. The method adopted at the time was to pick one transaction, convene all technical personnel, project members and leaders to verify together to analyze the functions that need to be optimized together and then tune, verify and repeat the process again and again until all has been optimized and transformed”.

 Li Gong, Technical Engineer of Sunline

After nearly a year, finally in March 2015, the WeBank distributed core system was successfully launched. The system had many pioneering features in the industry at that time, including the use of JAVA language for the development of architecture and business logic, and the use of distribution for all applications It has realized the separation of transaction and accounting, supports hundreds of millions of users and high concurrent transactions, etc., which has become the beginning of the distributed core system of my country’s banking industry.

Fully entered the distributed era: Traditional banks began to deploy distributed cores

WeBank became the first bank in the domestic banking system to adopt a distributed core system. This spark quickly formed a prairie fire. In 2015, Ping An Bank and Bank of Nanjing simultaneously initiated the construction of distributed core systems and the services provided by Sunline have already became a successful experience.

According to Wei Feng, Deputy General Manager of Sunline, the person in charge who is responsible for the construction of distributed core systems said, “During that period, Sunline was under great pressure. At that time, distributed technology was just starting and we are required to send experts who are familiar with distribution to our own bank. Facing the concentrated demand for distributed talents in the concurrent projects of two major banks, we can only urgently deploy the original team involved in the construction of the WeBank’s distributed core system project in the early stage of the project, make full use of evenings and weekends as well as emergency trainings so that everyone can be familiar with distributed development methods and technologies in the shortest time.”

 

Wei Feng, Deputy General Manager of Sunline

Therefore, at the end of 2015 all the developers of Sunline faced unprecedented pressure. Firstly, these are two heavyweight customers. Secondly, there are many customized development tasks and thirdly, there are not enough talents. Everyone can only grasp every minute and every second. This state continues until the end of January 2016, ensuring that the development tasks of the project are completed on time and with quality.

In October 2016, the distributed core banking systems of Ping An Bank and the Bank of Nanjing were launched at the same time. After the launch, the performance of the distributed core system completely met and exceeded the expected requirements, which gave banks in the industry considering replacing their distributed core systems. Over time, the enthusiasm to switch to distributed core banking systems soared.

In August 2019, the distributed core ushered in a major turning point for the traditional banking field. The first core banking system in the country that adopted a domestic distributed database was successfully implemented in Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank. Service providers were already familiar with distributed technology.

Prior to this, domestic databases were only used on the periphery such as payment systems, customer relationship management systems and query systems. Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank partnered with Sunline to make bold attempts to adopt domestic databases in the distributed core system which not only broke the bank’s long-term dependence on foreign database products but also further accelerated the process of the bank’s core distributed era.

After going online, the new core system effectively supports the docking requirements of hundreds of peripheral systems that runs smoothly with efficient operation and maintenance as well as having achieved good application effects. It provides successful and replicable cases for the bank’s distributed core. There has been a new wave in the field and there are countless banks that have learned from Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank. So far, the core of the bank has entered the distributed era.

Advanced Distributed Technology: The first ‘microservices + unitized’ distributed core system is implemented

From a technical perspective, there are three typical implementations of distributed mode which include distributed transaction database, database middleware and distributed application architecture. Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank adopts the first type of distributed mode, namely distributed database. The second type of distributed middleware needs to rely on mature and stable sub-database and sub-table middleware while the third type of distributed application architecture can be subdivided into three types, namely microservice architecture, modular architecture and ‘microservice + modular’ architecture. WeBank adopted this modular architecture model.

Zhang Mushu, Vice President Sunline R&D believes that unitization is a classic implementation mode of distributed architecture. Combining it with microservices architecture can bring more architecture dividends to the new generation of IT architecture such as unlimited scalability. Based on unit-level expansion and microservices elastic scaling; multi-center deployment architecture, through unit multi-center multi-active deployment, to improve disaster tolerance; gray-scale release capability, based on unit gray-scale and microservices version gray-scale to improve version release reliability; Fault isolation capability, through unit fault isolation and microservices fault isolation, reduces the scope of faults and improves the overall availability of the system but at the same time it will also bring complexity to the architecture including cross-unit distributed transaction problems, cross-microservices distributed transaction problems, service splitting over-fine performance problems, cross-microservices and cross-unit batch scheduling problems as well as business adaptation and transformation issues, etc.

 Zhang Mushu, Vice President of R&D of Sunline

Relying on a deep understanding of distributed architecture, Sunline has actively innovated and introduced this design concept into the banking industry and launched the first ‘microservices + unitized’ distributed core system.

The ‘microservices + unitized’ distributed core can achieve flexible deployment and unlimited dynamic expansion at the technical service level which can meet the needs of explosive customers growth in the future. The business level supports rapid product innovation, rebuilds financial business processes and promotes transactions while the driving accounting method is transformed into a customer-centric service model based on product management.

At the time when Bank of Dongguan was preparing to transform into a distributed core, they investigated WeBank’s core and had set their sights on Sunline as their preferred solutions provider and Sunline was developing SunLtts V8. After understanding, the bank found that SunLtts V8 fits their future development direction and the direction of the industry so they were determined to change into the ‘best core’.

In June 2020, Bank of Dongguan’s new-generation core system was launched, fully meeting the bank’s requirements for low cost, high availability, high performance and rapid expansion. It can effectively support the rapid development of the bank’s digital business and meet the explosion of massive customer data and business, fully verifying the demand for rapid growth via the advanced nature of ‘microservices + unitized’ architecture.

With the extensive development of digital transformation, banks as a key area of informatization are bound to further increase their investment in digitalization. The majority of small and medium-sized banks need architecture solutions that can complete digital transformation with lower costs and higher performance and that is how distributed ‘microservices + unitized’ architecture came into being. This architectural model eliminates dependence on specific imported products from design to implementation, laying a solid foundation for banks to achieve high-quality, high-reliability and high-security digital development.

With the constantly surpassing technology, the core banking system has gone through different development stages, especially in the past ten years. Every advanced development cannot be separated from the promotion of technology and innovation but technological development is far more than this. A new round of technological development is constantly being updated and the future can be expected.

The development cycle of Sunline has been increased from the previous four-week iterations to the frequency of iterations every two weeks and 95% of the requirements for each iteration can be developed within one week. In terms of continuous integration improvement, the platform supports more than 100 application integrations as well as exceeding 500 application integrations and tests daily, reducing the integration time to the minute. In continuous deployment, it can meet the requirements of application deployment and online at any time period. With these innovations, Sunline aims to help financial institutions improve their research and development (R&D) efficiency.

In this era where software defines everything, software delivery efficiency and quality have become the core competitiveness of current enterprises and are the foundations for enterprises to meet the diverse needs of users.

In 2017, the “DevOps Status Research Report” by Puppet and DORA (DevOps Research Assessment) that combined more than 27,000 DevOps survey feedback proved that DevOps practice promotes higher IT efficiency and improves productivity, profit and market share. However, the successful implementation of DevOps is still hard to achieve.

MOne reduces the distance between enterprises and successful DevOps implementations

Sunline realizes the support of tools in the DevOps revolution through a self-developed one-stop R&D collaborative management platform, Manager One (hereinafter referred to as the MOne Platform). MOne platform is developed to identify the problems and shortcomings of R&D efficiency, adopting advanced R&D architecture and has been polished through many business scenarios to cover project and application integrations. The entire process of continuous deployment and measurement feedback can provide enterprises with a complete solution from demand, code and deployment that comprehensively improve enterprise research and development efficiency as well as strengthen internal collaborative management.

• MOne covers the entire life cycle of product R&D including goal planning, demand management, iteration tracking, code management, construction management, test management, deployment and release, achieving a one-stop delivery of R&D management.

• MOne integrates mainstream DevOps tool chain, provides visual delivery pipeline management and deeply incorporates the entire R&D tool chain.

• MOne sub-products can be deployed independently and users can independently choose product application development scenarios.

• MOne Report provides visual R&D performance index measurement and analysis, identifies low performance and provides data support for continuous improvement.

Application Method 1: MOne agile project management based on OKR

What is MOne OKR?

MOne OKR is an enterprise collaboration platform that implements OKR management methods. OKR (Objectives and Key Results) refers to the method of objectives and key results. It is a set of management tools and methods for clarifying, as well as tracking objectives and their completion. MOne OKR combines tools and concepts to provide platform tool support for the implementation of OKR. MOne OKR combines the OKR management method, based on the “agile” concept to provide a visual model that realize the openness and transparency of the entire OKR process of the team. Through OKR decomposition and formulation, implementation feedback and review as well as scoring functions, management of the entire life cycle of OKR is realized. MOne OKR also can integrate Enterprise WeChat group robot notifications to enable real-time follow-up and feedback progress, ensuring that efficiency is achieved.

MOne agile project management for ‘planning first’ and iterative implementation

In terms of design integration with Jira, MOne OKR provides project and lane structure decomposition. The goal, key results and the hierarchical structure of Jira’s Epic, user story, and subtask will gradually decompose OKR formulation. MOne OKR provides a ‘target tree’ display design which realizes the link association from ‘department target’ to ‘R&D task’, enabling visualized target and tracking management process through the combination of target and R&D task.

In terms of functions, MOne OKR plans quarterly short-term goals, integrates Jira to automatically track and measure the progress of goal completion, combines with Scrum Agile development methods and continuously delivers through iterative sprints, achieving a closed loop from user needs in the software development process.

MOne Agile R&D Management combines OKR and agile projects to achieve quarterly goal planning and iterative implementation mechanism with many advantages:

• Transparent collaboration: Provides an open and transparent collaboration mechanism for OKR based on the three MOne OKR modes.

• Quantitative tracking: OKR is a continuous quantitative tracking method for goals, which requires regular tracking and review to ensure the achievement of goals. MOne OKR provides traceability and integrates Corporate WeChat robot notifications to remind and notify the progress of goals in real time, while reviewing and measuring the function provides support for the resumption.

• ‘Planning first ‘and iterative realization: MOne integrates Jira to realize the unified association of ‘Goals → Key Results → EPIC → Story → Subtasks’, thereby achieving automatic measurement of the progress of the goal and unity from quarterly planning to weekly iteration.
  

• Continuous improvement: In the process of project management, retrospective meetings should be held regularly, which also follow the PDCA principle (plan-execute-check-process). MOne OKR provides online meeting minutes.

 

Application Method 2: Continuous integration and deployment of DevOps based on MOne to improve overall process efficiency

1. What is continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment?

• Continuous integration emphasizes that the efficiency after a developer submits a new code to immediately build and test it. According to the test results, we can determine whether the new code and the original code can be correctly integrated.

• Continuous delivery is based on continuous integration and deployment of the integrated code to ‘production-like environments’ that are closer to the real operating environment.

• Continuous delivery can be regarded as the next step of continuous integration. No matter how your software is updated, you must ensure the ability to deliver ‘anytime’.

• Continuous deployment is to automate the process of deployment to the production environment on the basis of continuous delivery.

2. MOne realizes continuous CI/CD process

In the continuous delivery process of DevOps, MOne is supported by two sub-products, ‘MOne Pipeline’ and ‘MOne Deploy’. The MOne Pipeline continuous integration platform is aimed at developers and testers, positioned at the CI stage of continuous integration of applications. Through visual process orchestration, the difficulty of starting continuous integration is reduced. Through the built-in standard process of different languages, it allows quick realization of the project integration process.

The core advantages of MOne Pipeline continuous integration:

• Migration from offline to online, providing visual integrated process orchestration and only need to pay attention to process design.

• Based on the project dimension ‘multi-application’ construction support, easily solve the problem of application construction when multi-application collaborative development under the microservice architecture.

• Effective measurement mechanism from development to integration as well as other key indicators measurement.

• Standard development specifications, Code Review Specification, Code Branch Strategy, etc.

The MOne Deploy continuous deployment platform is oriented to operation and maintenance personnel, positioned at the CD stage of the application’s continuous deployment. Through the business-oriented multi-scenario design, from applications and other scenarios, it supports the application full life cycle deployment, operation and maintenance capabilities.

The core advantages of MOne Deploy continuous integration:

• Business-oriented multi-scenario design to control the entire life cycle of applications.
• Visual process orchestration enabling SQL change process embedded in the application deployment process to realize simultaneous changes of the application and database.
• The dynamic model mechanism of the application supports a variety of different application delivery.
• Effective data backup and log cleaning strategies to ensure data security.
• Effective measurement mechanism, from the measurement of multiple key indicators such as deployment frequency, average duration, deployment success rate, etc.

Application Method 3: MOne Work Order Support Solution to quickly improve products and solve customer problems

For R&D companies, it is very important to count and collect product defects and user feedback when exporting commercial products or solutions. A unified platform entry is needed to track defects and feedback by entering work orders to help us quickly improve products and solve customer problems, form a unified delivery process and quality system in order to improve the company’s products and services competitiveness. 

The MOne Service Desk platform is a unified platform entrance that mainly solves the problem of cross-organization and departmental R&D collaboration, providing a unified defect collection portal, visual tracking process and feedback mechanism as well as improving the efficiency of problem solving that cracks cross-organizational collaboration issues from the aspects of users, unified delivery, process, specification, measurement and feedback.

The MOne Service Desk R&D collaborative work order system provides corresponding process specifications for different users:
• As a user: the need to only pay attention to ‘problem entry’ and ‘problem put forward’, after entering the problem, just wait for the reply of the problem then you will be able to check the progress of the problem
• As a delivery team: it can accept the questions raised by users on the platform, allowing follow up and deal with it based on the visual interface.
• As a research and development team: the need to only pay attention to and complete the tasks assigned by the delivery team.

The MOne Service Desk R&D collaborative work order system has many advantages:
• Realize the separation of R&D and delivery. R&D only needs to deal with the tasks assigned by the delivery team and can develop products with peace of mind while the delivery team is responsible for problem life cycle management and customer maintenance
• Integrate Jira to get through the tool chain
• Unified delivery channel
• Automatic data measurement feedback
• Enterprise WeChat notification mechanism allow work order integrates the Enterprise WeChat robot notification which will be triggered when the work order is transferred.

In the digital age, technological evolution will never stop and user needs are constantly changing. Only by adopting a more complete technical support system and accelerating product iteration, enterprises can ensure the rapid development and enhancement of core competitiveness. DevOps has become the most critical part of whether enterprises can win in the digital competition.

As a leader in financial technology innovation, Sunline always pay attention to the development and practice of the latest technologies. In the future, Sunline will continue to explore and innovate, integrate tools and DevOps standards to help more companies improve R&D efficiency and enhance their core competitiveness.

The exploration of data sharing and open data in banking has contributed to the development of open banks in UK and EU. In China, a number of large domestic banks such as Bank of China, China Merchants Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank have launched their own open platform. Sunline have a deep understanding in the development and business essence of open bank, taking the lead in building an open financial platform and enabling banks to grasp the opportunities of open banking.

Open banking is an integral part of the digital transformation path of commercial banks, emphasizing on customer-centricity, Open API, SDK to deepen partnership between bank and third party businesses through the integration of financial services and lifestyle scenarios to enhance optimal allocation of financial resources and services efficiency, achieving a win-win for both the bank and its partners. Open Banking Ecosystem uses Banking-as-a-service (BAAS) as a medium to connect bank and technology partners, enabling bank to leverage the innovative capabilities of partners for the provide lifestyle scenario services while partners can leverage the data from banks to provide customers with customized financial services that meet their needs.

The bank opening up its finances becomes inevitable

Banks’ operating system always siloed and the IT department of the banks often have to face lengthy timeline in project delivery hence product innovation to meet the constant demand changes of customers are also affected. With an open banking business model, banks can improve their services and provide better user experience.

The urgency of open banking in small and medium-sized banks is greater than large banks because:

• The capital cost and customer acquisition cost of large banks are much lower than that of small and medium-sized banks. Large banks have strong financial strength and their competitive advantages will become more and more obvious.

• Small and medium-sized banks are at a disadvantage in the competition with large banks but they can partner with third party vendors on scenarios they lack, allowing the banks to focus on financial services that they excel in, enhancing the overall competitiveness of banks.

Sunline Helps Banks Seize Opportunities with Open Banking Opportunities Through Leading Open API Technology

Sunline’s is one of the pioneer in open banking has helped develop numerous mature and stable solutions for banks and financial institutions of different sizes. Sunline’s financial open platform is a technology platform that implements data sharing around open API technology, providing security control, open portals, API lifecycle management, operation and maintenance monitoring, sandboxing, process orchestration as well as other functions designed to help banks enrich financial scenarios and enhance financial services. As of 2019, Sunline has implemented open platform for financial institutions such as Ping An Bank, Bank of Dongguan, Bank of Zhengzhou, Bank of Dalian, Jifu Group and others.

Advanced architecture enables banks to get more with less

• Sunline’s Open Platform integrates financial capabilities with lifestyle scenarios and enhance financial capacity to the scene party through the open domain.

• Scene domain: The partner uses open API to implement various user scenarios.

• Open domain: Open domain includes the API (SDK tool) to provide user authorized access and API gateway (used for routing and forwarding, access control, etc.) to the scene domain.

• Shared domain: Provides common services to open platforms and services through process orchestration.

• Open portal: Provides an entrance for API display retrieval and provides a standard process for partner access.

• Integrated operation management: Includes portal website management, access process management, operation monitoring management, API gateway management, etc.

• Application domain: Back-end financial applications that provide financial services.

The core competence of The Open Platform of Evergreen Technology Finance

1.  API Gateway as the core domain

The key technology of open banking is API and the key technology of open platform is API gateway. Open APIs can be divided into three categories which are open internal APIs, open APIs to partners and open external APIs. As the entry of these three types of API calls needs to go through the API gateway, it is most appropriate for the API gateway to carry out the access control and authentication of different APIs.

The core functions of the API gateway are:

• Routing and forwarding.

• Message conversion and parameter mapping.

• Multi-protocol access to the gateway supports http(s), rpc, dubbo, webservice, tcp and protocol scalability.

• API governance functions including parameter check, fuse degradation, limit flow, grayscale routing, concurrent control, time-out control, etc.

• Security controls such as IP black-and-white list, SSL/TLS, JWT certification, OAuth2 certification, etc.

Gateways, as the entry point for traffic require transaction-level logs and link tracking, log management, and monitor alerts. The API gateway has evolved into a feature-rich, external component that can provide services independently.

2.  Open portal and integrated transport for a complete access process

Although the core domain of the gateway is completed, the API services of the open platform can communicate and reach agreement with partners through offline methods, but there are many problems associated with offline communication.

For banks:

• There is no platform for unified management and release of APIs because the entire lifecycle management of the API depends on manual offline services.

• There is no unified platform for access partner management because the access process relies on offline communication.

• There is no authentication process for APIs consumed by partners.

For partners:

• Partners do not have a unified API search portal for the APIs opened by the bank.

• There is no standard access procedure for APIs provided by consumers.

By opening the portal, partners can access the complete access procedures, API display and promotion, help documents, enterprise certification, sandbox experience, developer center, call monitoring and other functions.

3.  Open service

Open services are public services provided by open platforms to business parties. These services are gradually evolved by banks during the opening process and play a very important role in the opening process of APIs. Existing open services include global pipeline services, billing services, authentication services, process orchestration services, etc.

Process orchestration services

Process orchestration service is a core capability of the open platform. It can quickly connect or combine services in the industry to meet changing scene-side requirements. The open platform can achieve capability reuse through process orchestration. Internal services are orchestrated and exported via API (internal orchestration can span all-row business systems), and external requests can call corresponding API interfaces after passing authorization authentication.

Take the opening of an account to activate a ball game as an example, through the process of orchestration services, the combination of the API interface of the digital account opening of the account center, the marketing center’s marketing activity compliance inspection interface and the third-party API interface of the ticketing platform are the three services that jointly achieve account opening and delivery Scene of ball game tickets.

Through the process orchestration service and services can be combined. The necessary verification and data mapping are added to provide an external combined service to the scenario.

Billing services

Billing service is an essential part of the bank’s implementation of API economy and the billing service can be billed according to the billing rules set by the bank, such as the number of calls implemented.

• The gateway is the unified entrance for API calls and the API gateway pushes the call pipeline information to MQ.

• The billing module pulls pipeline information from MQ and stores it in the database. The daily scheduled task counts the total number of calls on T-1 day according to the application and API dimensions and saves it into the library.

Certified Licensing Services

Banks’ financial services must be exposed on the public network and security must be considered. Here, the security of the entire transaction is guaranteed by means of authentication and authorization and signing and encryption.

Open platform docking microservices framework

Open platform uses a microservice architecture system. During the implementation process, if the open platform is to interface with many microservices, there will inevitably be problems that must be solved under the microservice architecture including service dependency management, service governance, full stack level monitoring, call link analysis, log management, etc.

In order to solve the problems inherent in the microservices framework, the open platform is connected to Sunline’s microservices framework platform to obtain a full range of operation monitoring at the application service level, including application and component monitoring alarms, log analysis, link tracking, application component as well as performance monitoring and analysis.

A future-proof open banking platform cannot be achieved without the guidance and regulation of supervision as well as the support and drive of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data and cloud computing. In the exploration and practice of open banking, Sunline’s Open Banking team has accumulated rich experience and API usage scenarios and has continuously improve the technical framework of its financial open platform, verifying the advanced concepts and mature capabilities. Sunline’s Open Banking team will continue to strengthen technological innovation to help banks seize the development opportunities of open banks and promote the development of open banks in China.