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In July 2022, the first mainframe migration project for a large state-owned bank’s credit card distribute core was successfully put into production despite the severe epidemic situation. This project not only marks another pioneering success with unprecedented influence in the industry and gains positive regulatory attentions because of its originality, but also puts forth higher benchmarking standards and stricter requirements for the industry peers. The superior implementation and delivery by Sunline have landed yet another best practice in the large state-owned banks market, once again displaying strong verification of the company’s leading position in the financial IT field and setting another milestone in innovation-led transformation.

Setting the path to empower the transformation of large banks under the innovation-led trend

In recent years, the wave of digitization and credit innovation has swept across various fields, and the core system of China’s bank credit card business has entered a new round of localization and upgrading, with large state-owned banks taking the lead in opening the road to credit card core localization.

While legacy cores are not only expensive, the use of complex business models and redundant account structures limit the improvements of management capabilities and customer experiences that comes with the need of rapid business innovation and neither the bank’s credit card business development of “double-100 million” needs. After the system reconstruction, the overall operating cost for the bank’s credit card business has been reduced by 40% with a credit card core system supporting full-featured integration in the country and abroad. The architecture integrates the advantages of cloud-native, unitized and distributed databases, and componentized applications greatly improves transaction processing, data-driven business design, transaction-level sub-account structure, etc., truly realizing customer-oriented services and management requirements, creating China’s first benchmark for a secure and controllable large state-owned bank’s credit card core project.

Two years to build the world’s leading system with hundreds of millions of customers

The bank’s new credit card core project includes four modules: authorization, card issuance, accounting, and quota, among which Sunline is mainly responsible for authorization and card issuance. Sunline’s project team commenced in August 2020, and the technology launch was completed in October 2021. The new core system carries an average daily volume of 400 million transactions with the peak transaction volume supporting more than 30,000 transactions per second. The batch running time at night is less than 2 hours. Compared to the legacy system, the new core has doubled the capacity and recorded leading performances in all aspects in the industry.

The new-generation credit card core system leads in several aspects:

·     Domestic distributed cloud platform deployment, covering the Paas components of the technology platform with unitized, distributed, and microservices based architecture to establish various independent and mutually collaborative competence centers fully support the rapid deployment of business and meet the needs of the high concurrent customer transactional demands, greatly enhancing the credit card business operations and product innovation capabilities of the large state-owned bank.

·     Runs on the domestic distributed database, OceanBase, which greatly improves the data processing efficiency and storage capacity in line with the requirements of innovation-led transformation which drives security and controllability in the industry.

·     Adopting multi-tenant application design through the combination of logical and physical isolation, realizing strong data isolation and effectively controlling the impact radius caused by database abnormalities.

·     Deployment architecture adopts the modes of dual locations, three centers and five copies to realize geography redundancy mode with same-city active-active disaster recovery, ensuring high data availability and greatly improving system disaster tolerance.

·     Adopt agile delivery model in project management and realize rapid iteration through DevOps pipeline.

Sharing successes by overcoming difficulties and ensuring progress

Sunline’s project team has a peak of nearly 80 people, who jointly practice the values and development concept of sharing successes with customers. Sunline focuses on customer need with continuous innovation and value creation. The bank also provides a platform for Sunline to grow and learn, and both parties collaborated to be the co-builders of a secure and controllable system.

The first batch went through ten rounds of data migration, two sandbox exercises, and five rounds of production follow-ups, but the day of the launch was still full of tension and anxiety. Sunline had worked side by side with all departments of the bank for nearly 30 hours, and successfully completed the first batch of production with steadfast efforts and strong technical capabilities. This production is a phased victory and the beginning of another chapter.

After two months of closure due to outbreak management, the team immediately worked on the second batch of production and launch after a short period of adjustment. Thanks to the previous rounds of drills and refined management, the data migration was carried out in an orderly manner, the platform and applications were running stably and the internal transaction tests were also carried out smoothly, marking successful completion of the second batch of production.

The data volume to go live for the third batch was 30 times that of the second, and 9000 times of the first. From the perspective of data migration and applicability, the exponentially increasing data volume indicates a biggest test. On the basis of the first two rounds, the third batch of production was completed 2 hours earlier than the original opening time, which was extremely rare in the industry.

After the president in charge of the bank announced the success of the production, two years of hard work with more than 30 rounds of drills, more than a dozen active-active switching drills, and multiple rounds of production stress tests have finally paid off. Those tough times also turned into heartwarming moments.

During the two years, the project team ensured the best progress of the project as the primary mission under different difficulties. In order to ensure the smooth progress of project production during Chinese New Year, some had sacrificed going home for the Spring Festival for two years. In order to support the production during the closed period under the severe epidemic, three project teams were urgently arranged to stay in the bank for support and respond to the arrangements of the bank. On behalf of the entire project team, they have fought on the front line to ensure the orderly and smooth development of the production site. The project team’s down-to-earth working style and overcoming of all difficulties have been highly recognized in the industry.

The person in charge for Sunline’s Credit Card Business said: “There will be times when the bank will replace foreign credit card system that has occupied the large domestic bank market for 20 years. It is a day for Chinese Credit Card Business to be proud, and it is also an impetus for us to move forward and enter the overseas card market. It is the beginning of a glorious time for us”.

This project is a major breakthrough in the credit card core innovation for large state-owned banks in China. Sunline has made yet another great achievement in credit innovation. In the process of realizing independence and controllability for more domestic banks, Sunline will continue to lead the development direction of China’s financial industry with professionalism, innovation, hard work and courage.

Recently, Sunline has successively won the project for a ten-million retail credit system for a joint-stock bank as well as the credit management system projects for two provincial rural credit companies, realizing the transformation of credit products digitization, business process, business model innovation and scenario-based service upgrade with product innovation and risk control enhancements.

The banking industry is an industry with high degree of informatization, hence, to improve product launch efficiency, customer experience, precision marketing, and business scenarios, the system’s IT architecture must be flexible and open. Recently, most banks have realized that the construction of a credit system is no longer just the functional construction of a silo system, but the digital design of the whole process of industry technology that is driven by business, combined with domain modeling, supports efficient implementation technology, built on an enterprise-level architecture in the credit field and is able to realize the flexible integration of steady state and sensitive state through refined layered design. The powerful self-controllable distributed microservices platform should not only quickly realizes differentiated functional requirements, but also forms the bank’s own business assets throughout the process, comprehensively improving the enterprise-level capabilities of business and technology to meet the differentiated needs of bank customers.

Sunline has been focusing on the credit field for 16 years. The new generation credit business platform is built on enterprise-level “competence center + microservices + componentization” architecture design, which is the next generation solution to banking business. Sunline’s platform is the optimal comprehensive scenario-based solution with rapid product innovation, business process management, highly intelligence, flexible architecture, as well as data, automation and digitization first, providing the cornerstone to support the long-term sustainable development of the credit business.

• Through the enterprise architecture modeling method, the requirements of the business line are abstracted into various business components with capabilities covering all the business rules of the entire lifecycle of the credit business and are segmented into multiple groups according to the consideration of the reusability of the credit business functions.

• The concept of the platform design is to quickly respond to the needs of various business lines, and at the same time, being able to coordinate with related systems in different sub-sectors in the industry and match business components according to the business rules in different stages of the entire life cycle of specific credit products to achieve credit the creation of products.

• Credit business products are embedded into rich application scenarios through the orchestration of business process, transaction process and approval process.

• Relying on an independent, secure, and reliable distributed architecture, the flexible business modeling system drives the splitting of microservices, realizing the combination of stable business development and the openness of the digital economy.

Based on years of experience in the industry, Sunline fully supports banks to provide more reasonable, practical and innovative integrated credit services through the two-way cooperation of business and technology, helping banks wave through the digital and intelligent future.

The Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit (HIFS) 2022, Huawei’s annual flagship event held in Marina Bay Sands, Singapore from July 20 to 22 with the theme of “Shaping Smarter, Greener Finance” convened hundreds of leading figures, KOLs, academic experts, and partners in the global financial industry to discuss how to shape green and digital finance in light of the future development trend of the financial industry.

At the HIFS “Building a Trusted and Innovative Cloud for the Financial Industry” sub-forum, Sunline, represented by Chief Strategy Officer, Mr. Matthew Chen, shared his insights about how banks can transform their core banking from Monolithic to DeFi, with in-depth discussion on redefining Banking 4.0 and introducing how banks can switch to a new core to realize quick customer acquisition and business volume increase.

Matthew Chen, Chief Strategy Officer of Sunline presenting at HIFS 2022

As a vital ecological partner of Huawei’s financial industry, apart from sharing of insights during the summit, Sunline and Huawei also officially launched their joint cloud native digital loan solution. Built on Huawei Cloud, the solution adopts the enterprise-level microservices banking framework EDSP released by Sunline in 2020, creating a solution with novel experience, capabilities, speed, architecture and foundation.

The launching of Sunline and Huawei Joint Cloud Native Digital Loan Solution

At the cornerstones of national economies, financial institutions have an increasing need to realize contactless, digital, and online financial services, especially in the current post-pandemic situation. However, global banks are facing similar challenges in the course of their digital transformation journey with huge costs and risks to replace their legacy systems, limited budget and uncertain return on investment associated with transformation, lack of open business and technology experience, increasingly fierce competitions, and increasing demands of contactless service driven by the pandemic, etc., hence it is imperative to have a solution that can respond rapidly to the urgent need and requirements from both FIs and their customers in terms of digital financial services.

Sunline and Huawei Joint Cloud Native Digital Loan Solution adopts an open strategy, allowing financial institutions to launch a wide range of contactless services, such as online loan product campaign, customer E-KYC, risk assessment, fund disbursement, and post-loan processing. The solution supports rapid, dynamic horizontal scaling on both the business and system demands and provides DevOps continuous delivery assembly line to meet the increasingly agile development requirements of financial institutions. Ultimately, making banking much more convenient, while remaining user-friendly, timely, and professional, leading to better customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.

Sunline and Huawei have established multi-level in-depth collaborations with increasing successful implementation cases in the industry. In the future, further collaborations between Sunline and Huawei will bring greater innovation to the market, helping the global financial industry to accelerate their digital transformation.

 

Recently, the The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People’s Republic of China and the People’s Government of Guangdong Province jointly held the “2022 China Digital Economy Innovation and Development Conference”. During the conference, the China Electronic Information Industry Association hosted the “Enterprise Digital Transformation Leading Manufacturing High-quality Development Forum” and Gao Sumei, Secretary-General of the association announced the first batch of the “100 Excellent Digital Transformation Cases in 2022″. Sunline’s distributed core business solutions, data asset management solutions and data lake solutions were enlisted.

In order to implement the relevant national decision-making and deployment, the forum has launched a collection of digital transformation solutions and application cases. This work has received many positive responses and participation from the majority of enterprises, and has been reviewed by experts from the dimensions of technological advancement, typicality, and promotion value. To date, there were 102 excellent cases launched, fully demonstrating the ability and level of China’s information system construction and service enterprises.

Distributed core banking solutions

Relying on the long-term accumulated experience in the field of core banking systems, Sunline uses the industry’s advanced self-developed technologies to build a new generation “microservices + unitized” architecture to meet current requirements of the banks as well as their explosive growth needs for future businesses development. At present, the system has been successfully launched and operated stably in nearly 100 banks including policy banks, state-owned banks, joint-stock commercial banks, and city commercial banks, setting quite a number of industry benchmarks for the digital transformation of banking institutions in the country.

Data asset management solutions

In the context of the in-depth advancement of digital transformation, strengthening data management and releasing the value of data elements has become a fundamental work that the financial industry attaches great importance to. Sunline has begun to deploy big data business as early as 2015, always driven by market demand to continuously carry out technological innovation, versions upgrading and solutions transformation, which comprehensively covers strategic planning, management mechanism consultation, implementation and product services, etc. At the same time, the automated and intelligent design minimizes manual workload, helping financial institutions carry out data asset management continuously and effectively. At present, the program has provided more than 90 financial customers with consultion, implementation, products and other services.

Data lake solutions

The highlight of Sunline’s data lake solution is that it has opened up the data assets of enterprises in different fields such as theme models, data interfaces, data labels, data indicators, third-party data, behavioral data, etc., and subsequently analyzed and processed through big data platform, and promoted through reporting platform, etc. Various data services help account managers to understand customers’ asset information and behavior preferences in an all-rounded way, effectively promoting marketing and risk control identification.

At present, the digital transformation and upgrading of thousands of industries has pressed been accelerated. Sunline will continue to focus on the financial field, insist on independent research and development, and consolidate the professional innovation ability of various products and services to be a leader and powerful partner for financial institutions in their digital transformation journey.

Recently, the seventh phase of Penghua Fund’s Big Data TA System Construction Project was successfully launched, which not only further optimized the company’s business continuity, but also realized connections to the new ETF-TA system, making the big data TA system more comprehensive. As the industry’s first registration system based on big data architecture, the big data TA system created by Penghua Fund and Sunline took the lead in completing the application practice of big data in the asset management industry and even the core business of the industry. The breakout from the limitation to the legacy data center applications provides a strong proof, demonstrating positive effects towards the banking industry, securities industry, insurance industry, as well as asset management industry.

Those who adapt to changes will survive, and those who continuously innovate will be evergreen

In 2021, when the total scale of Penghua Fund exceeded one trillion, the company wrote this on their official WeChat page: “For public funds, the really important question is not whether the industry has opportunities, but can we seize the opportunities’”

Back in 2017, the rapid expansion of China’s asset management market, the partial equilibrium of the industry that traditional public funds have been maintained for more than two decades were gradually being broken. As one of the top ten asset management companies, Penghua Fund needed to find a way to sail the digital transformation journey, as well as adopt innovation and changes that is in line with the development of large asset management to achieve breakthroughs in response to the situation. In order to support sustainable developments of their business strategy, Penghua Fund officially launched the construction project of their next-generation TA system in compliance with the policy and market trend in 2018.

Penghua Fund joins hands with Sunline to start the innovative exploration

The open-end fund registration and transfer (TA) system covers all aspects of the fund transaction business with functions such as account opening, asset registration, and income distribution. It is the most important core system for asset management companies. However, with the rapid expansion of the digital platform, which has brought hundreds of millions of users onboard and tens of millions of transactions, the structure and performance of the legacy TA system faces many challenges including low clearing efficiency and difficulties in supporting the rapid development of the business. As a result of siloed TA systems, accounts data cannot be unified and personalized demand response was slow.

Outdated and scattered TA systems have hindered business development, and there were no mature products on the market that can be directly reused. For Sunline which has been deeply involved in the core system field of the financial industry for many years, the company have always adopted self-innovation in our genetics. Hence, Sunline is undoubtedly a powerful partner for this project. On this thorny road that has no previous experience to learn from, Sunline and Penghua Fund have begun to work together in the innovation and exploration journey.

Big Data TA System has now become the industry benchmark

In 2019, the big data TA system jointly created by Sunline and Penghua Fund was officially launched. This is the industry’s first registration system based on the big data architecture. The system innovatively adopts a hybrid big data and microservices architecture, which can support high-concurrency real-time digital access requirements and complete the end-of-day clearing business of massive data, integrating various issues faced by TA systems such as information silos and business bottlenecks. A set of systems has been implemented to support all wealth management channel businesses, and can cooperate with the specific business scenarios of the channels to support the comprehensive development of personalized business.

The first advanced and hybrid big data and microservices architecture

Introducing big data technology to build a clearing core provides high-throughput application data access to greatly improve efficiency in rapid clearing of massive data and meet the needs of rapid expansion of Penghua Fund’s business while the adopting microservices architecture and decomposing huge monolithic applications into multiple services solves the issues with application complexity while introduction of Spring framework quickly builds monolithic applications and expand into distributed applications by cooperating with SpringCloud to cope with a large number of concurrent applications data request

Fully empowering business innovation and development

The big data TA system has successfully withstood the test of various business scenarios since its launch three years ago. It supports dozens of cooperation channels, 100 million customers and 10 million transaction business of Penghua Fund, and continues to provide stable and efficient services for investors through:

·     A set of big data TA system supporting more than 30 balance wealth management channel businesses and refined management of channels to achieve sub-channel clearing without affecting each other, greatly improving the experience of investors.

·     Full coverage of all business scenarios of treasury TA. In addition to TA standard services such as subscription, general redemption, and quick redemption, it can cooperate with specific business scenarios of the channel to support personalized needs.

·     Constructing a unified operation digital background, supporting offline business processes to be fully online, reducing operation risks and improving operation management level, and opening the road to the construction of digital operations.

·     Breaking out of the traditional product-centric business model and turning to user-centric, creating values through user behavior and providing users with financial services in a scenario-based and embedded manner.

Leading the industry risk management with autonomy and control

The Big Data TA System Project has practiced the concept of autonomy and controllability since its construction. Based on valuable experience accumulated in the field of practice, Sunline helps the project to migrate core business from Oracle database to an open source-based big data platform to actively responds to the national independent and controllable strategy at the level of application software construction.

In addition, the success of Penghua Fund’s big data TA system project has also filled the gap in the market where there are few core business systems implemented using big data, providing a strong proof for big data technology to get rid of the shackles of data center applications. The promotion of data technology has played a good demonstration effect, and many leading fund companies have jumped the bandwagon.

The project lasted 4 years, from commencement of the first phase to the launching of the current phase 7, Penghua Fund has joined hands with Sunline along the way, opening a new chapter in the construction of the TA system in the domestic asset management industry. In the future, both parties will continue to collaborate to achieve more sharing of successes and driving the transformation of the financial industry!

Recently, the hybrid 2022 New Generation Information Technology Integration Innovation Cloud Summit with the theme “Integrated Application, Innovative Development” was held successfully. The event also released the results of the “2021 Digital Technology Innovative Application and Solutions” to commemorate the excellent solutions and application demonstration cases. Sunline’s “Distributed Core Business System” has won the “2021 Digital Technology Integrated Innovation Application” and “Single Technical Innovation” awards by virtue of its technological advancement, application demonstration and industry promotions.

The summit was jointly organized by the Cyber Security Industry Development Research Center of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Tianjin Bureau of Industry and Information Technology, the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology, and the Office of the Leading Group for Digital Fujian Construction in Fujian Province. Focusing on cutting-edge technologies, product innovations and application practices in China’s information technology field, the summit convened participants to jointly explore a new generation of information technology integrations and application innovation development mechanisms to build an efficient integration and innovation achievement exchange and docking platforms together, promoting the high-quality development of a new generation information technology industry. The General Office of the International Liaison Department of the CPC Central Committee, Information Center of the Central PR Department, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, representatives of financial institutions such as Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China CITIC Bank, as well as experts and academics in the fields of energy, transportation and telecommunications attended the meeting.

In the speech session of the financial forum on digital transformation, upgrading, innovation and development of the industry, Sun Shisheng, Deputy President of Sunline, shared the successful cases of Sunline’s new ecosystem and introduced how Sunline has built a distributed core banking systems in recent years and successful implementing in China CITIC Bank, Ping An Bank, Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank, Kunshan Rural Commercial Bank, Fujian Strait Bank, Yunnan Hongta Bank and other customers.

Being selected as a distinctive solution for information technology application innovation in 2021 marks a double affirmation of Sunline’s ability to achieve technological breakthroughs, promotion and demonstration value in the production of distributed core banking systems based on a new ecological basic software and hardware platform. As the industry changes over the century, technology should be self-improving and Sunline will continue to work hard in the future to help “speed up” China’s Credit Innovation ecosystem and contribute to develop its core strength!

The first Huawei Partner & Developer Conference 2022 with the theme of “Born by Gathering, For What You Can Do” was a hybrid forum gathering partners and global developers to seize new digital opportunities and win in the future era of digital intelligence. As a partner of Huawei, Sunline was invited to attend the conference attend and was once again awarded the “Kunpeng High Flying Award for Computing Business” and “Smart Data Outstanding Contribution Award” accolades.

As a digital pioneer and leader in the financial field, Sunline has joined the Huawei’s openGauss community and Euler’s open-source community, deepening the collaboration of Huawei Cloud’s ecosystem through the full integration with Kunpeng Taishan server and Huawei GaussDB.

The collaboration between Sunline and Huawei has entered an all-round, multi-level and wide-ranging development stage, with two-wheel drive and full-stack integration in domestic and foreign markets. At present, multiple solutions such as the full-stack distributed core banking system and financial integration data warehouse based on the Kunpeng ecosystem have been launched one after another, and have been rapidly promoted and implemented in many domestic financial institutions such as joint-stock banks and city commercial banks. At the same time, both parties have also actively collaborated to export China’s smart financial capabilities overseas, and released joint digital banking solutions to continue to contribute to the digital transformation of the global financial industry.

In the future, Sunline will continue to deepen enterprise digitalization, build strong capabilities, continuously innovate, explore and practice technological innovation, and collaborate with more ecological partners such as Huawei to carry out multi-dimensional and multi-angle cooperation to further strengthen the ecosystem.

Recently, Sunline won the capital management information system upgrade and transformation project for Jiugang Group Finance Co., Ltd. (thereafter referred to as Jiugang Finance), supporting the rapid development of its various financial businesses and marking a major breakthrough for Sunline setting footprints in the financial company market in China’s Northwest region.

The fund management information core system is the most important IT infrastructure of a finance company because it not only carries the heavy responsibility of centralizing managements of the group’s funds, but also provides service support for various financial businesses of the company. At present, the rapid development in the entire financial industry and the application of new technologies, to a certain extent, forces the rapid digitalization in financial companies.

Jiugang Finance was established in February 2011 with a registered capital of RMB 3 billion for the purpose of strengthening centralized management of funds and providing comprehensive financial services for its member companies. Jiugang Group is a pioneering diversified modern enterprise group with the largest scale steel products manufacturing and distribution in China’s Northwest region, with prestigious accolades including being the Top 500 Chinese Enterprises and Chinese Manufacturing Enterprises.

Starting from 2020, Jiugang Finance has spent two years in the selection process for its core system vendor through various methods such as invitation, communication, comparison, and analysis of a number of core system vendors in the industry to explore the best systems and solutions for financial companies. During the process, vendors were asked to build a system testing platform to allow Jiugang Finance to fully participate in system testing, analyze and refine the advantages and disadvantages of each system while also providing business references for the system selection. Jiugang Finance also visited and inspected many well-known financial companies in the industry to understand the benchmark for core system constructions and applications.

After a long period of analysis and peer research, Jiugang Finance believes that they should introduce the IT construction ideas and architectural planning schemes of commercial banks, and build a new generation financial company fund management system with the system construction concept of “small core + large peripheries”, becoming the first to construct such core systems in the financial company industry.

Sunline’s solutions for financial company are based on Sunline’s core banking products, using advanced technology platforms and underlying structures to develop settlement, credit, bills, foreign exchange, bank-enterprise, etc. that support the business of financial companies. This forms a comprehensive solution for financial companies. More importantly, this solution fully adheres to the loose coupling idea of “small core + large peripheries”. Each module is relatively independent and can be freely combined and matched. In this way, the liberty to choose system construction is truly given to the customer.

In addition, the advanced concepts and business innovation mechanism of Sunline’s financial product factory will enable Jiugang Finance to develop new financial products in a highly parameterized and componentized way in the future, shorten the launch cycle of new products, and reduce the repeated construction investments of its system and technology, allowing the finance company to respond more quickly to the needs of users and supporting new business developments.

The collaboration of Sunline and Jiugang Finance is a win-win. Sunline’s industry-leading technology and experienced team will contribute and give greater value to the new core system of Jiugang Finance.