WeBank: Embracing the construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and empowering financial services with technological innovation

A few days ago, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council officially issued the "Outline Development Plan for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area", marking the rise of the construction of the Greater Bay Area to a national strategic level. If the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area wants to become a leading bay area in the world, it cannot do without the power of technological innovation. It shoulders the historical responsibility of building a new highland for our country's innovative development and leading and driving the Pearl River Delta region to take the lead in realizing innovative transformation.

Shenzhen is located in the central city of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Its technological innovation capabilities and overall financial industry development level rank among the top cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Technology and financial elements are closely integrated. As the first Internet bank approved to open in the country, WeBank was born in this innovative and creative city. Since its establishment, WeBank has been developing financial technology and actively exploring the financial applications of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, cloud computing, big data and other technologies. Give full play to the positive role of financial technology in empowering the real economy and promoting the development of inclusive finance.

"ABCD" leads the way, ranking fifth in the world with 104 patents in the year

The integration of technology and finance can deeply drive financial innovation in the banking industry and actively promote economic growth and social development. At the beginning of its establishment, WeBank established the corporate vision of "technology, inclusiveness, and connection" and elevated the "ABCD technology strategy" to the height of the bank's development strategy, hoping to use technology to explore a safer, more A more efficient and smarter Internet banking service model serves markets currently not covered by the traditional financial industry and fulfills the original intention of inclusive finance. It is reported that in the four years since its opening, WeBank has invested more than 1 billion yuan in information technology, biotechnology and financial technology, and the bank's scientific and technological personnel have always maintained more than half of the total number of employees.

Relying on innovative construction methods of open source technology and distributed architecture technology platform, WeBank has successfully built a fully independent and controllable banking core system that can support hundreds of millions of customers and highly concurrent transactions. At present, WeBank has built 253 key systems and 1,223 subsystems. It was selected into the 10 major financial informatization events of the People's Bank of China in 2015, and won the first prize of Shenzhen Financial Innovation Award for two consecutive years in 2016 and 2017. It is understood that the number of patent applications publicly filed by WeBank in 2018 has ranked fifth in the world and third in China, with 104 patent applications throughout the year.

The construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area is a new attempt in the new era to promote a new pattern of comprehensive opening up. If the financial technology companies involved want to occupy a place in the fierce competition environment, the key lies in "open cooperation". WeBank has always implemented the "three major open strategies" in terms of financial technology: First, open platforms provide financial capabilities to partners through APIs, SDKs, etc. The second is to follow the open source technology trend and open up its own technological capabilities to the market through open source and open software. The third is open collaboration, including collaboration with financial peers, especially collaboration with financial institutions in the “9+2” urban agglomeration of the Greater Bay Area, as well as collaboration with industries, so that finance can truly serve the real economy.

Strengthen financial technology capabilities and empower financial services

Financial technology is inseparable from the four major sectors of artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, and big data. On the one hand, WeBank has increased investment in science and technology and strengthened its financial technology capabilities; on the other hand, in conjunction with its "three major opening strategies", WeBank has carried out multi-level cooperation with other financial institutions and non-financial institutions to empower financial services. Strive to form an industry joint effort to promote the reform of the financial services industry, gain new competitiveness, and touch the future development of the banking industry.

As a purely online innovative bank, WeBank has no branches or teller staff. In order to solve problems such as customer identity authentication and customer service, WeBank applies artificial intelligence and biometric technology to remote customer identity authentication, intelligent customer service and other fields, and builds innovative products and services with WeBank characteristics. In terms of intelligent customer service, WeBank launched the intelligent cloud customer service "Weijin Xiaoyun", which is trained through deep learning models.

At present, an intelligent robot (Quote 300024, stock diagnosis) can replace 400 manual customer service personnel, and 98% of customer service services are completed by intelligent cloud customer service, which not only effectively supports massive customer needs, but also greatly saves labor costs.

In the development process of artificial intelligence, it will also face a series of new problems. The most typical example is the "data island" problem. If this problem is not solved for one day, it may inhibit the long-term development of the field of artificial intelligence and cause serious business consequences. In response to the above problems, Professor Yang Qiang and WeBank have put forward a systematic and general solution based on "federated learning" after many efforts, which can solve the problem of joint modeling between individuals (to C) and between companies (to B). Recently, WeBank also took the lead in hosting the first meeting of the IEEE P3652.1 (Federated Learning Infrastructure and Applications) Standard Working Group. The IEEE P3652.1 project is the first international standard in the field of federated learning. In the future, "federated learning" is expected to break down data barriers in various fields and industries, and implement the dividends brought by artificial intelligence to every corner of society.

WeBank has also been at the forefront of the industry in the application of blockchain. Blockchain has attributes including distributed architecture, consistency, consensus mechanism, encryption algorithm and so on. Since its establishment, WeBank has invested resources in developing blockchain and distributed ledger technology, and built a self-developed distributed banking core architecture to handle massive customers and highly concurrent transactions. In May 2016, WeBank, together with several institutions, launched the Financial Blockchain Cooperation Alliance (Shenzhen) to promote the research and development and application of blockchain technology. In the same year, together with Shanghai Huarui Bank, it launched an inter-institution reconciliation platform based on the alliance chain. This is also the first domestic banking alliance chain application scenario running in a production environment, and is committed to solving the problem of high reconciliation costs among financial institutions. Recently, WeBank also signed a cooperation agreement with the Macau government to establish the Macau Science and Technology Development Fund, which will use innovative technologies such as blockchain as the main fulcrum to strengthen the scientific and technological innovation capabilities of the Special Administrative Region, promote the development of smart cities, and further implement the concept of technology benefiting people's livelihood. Wellbeing Measures.

Deep integration of industry, academia and research to ensure sustained technological innovation capabilities

To continue to maintain technological innovation capabilities, cultivating financial technology talents that meet needs has become key. WeBank attaches great importance to the in-depth integration of industry, academia, and research. In order to give full play to the advantages of Shenzhen's local financial technology resources and introduce international high-quality educational resources, WeBank and Shenzhen University established the Financial Technology Research Institute in 2018. We jointly undertake scientific research and development projects, hire high-level researchers, and jointly train master's, doctoral, and postdoctoral talents to promote teachers' basic research and development practice, students' scientific and technological innovation training, and enterprise technology project research, promote the deep integration of industry, academia, and research, and achieve multi-faceted ***win.

In January this year, WeBank and Nanyang Technological University *** jointly established the Singapore Fintech Joint Research Center, which will fully combine WeBank’s financial technology innovation advantages and Nanyang Technological University’s world-class technology The university has advantages in scientific research, closely tracking the research and development and application of cutting-edge technologies in the field of financial technology, accelerating the industrialization and commercialization process of related technologies, vigorously cultivating a team of leading talents in financial technology, and building an industry-professional linkage, teaching and scientific research integration, and a combination of theory and practice. School-enterprise cooperation model.

WeBank has also carried out research cooperation with Xi'an University of Electronic Science and Technology, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, etc. in the fields of blockchain architecture, performance, security, encryption algorithm, cross-chain communication, etc., and also plans to Cutting-edge technologies such as hardware computing acceleration and high-throughput virtual machines are applied to more financial scenarios, while simultaneously creating a new generation of high-throughput blockchain computing engines.

In terms of government cooperation, WeBank actively connects with the National Standards Committee, the Standards Institute of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, ISO/TC307, IEEE and other standard organizations, and is deeply involved in multiple blockchain-related international, national, industry and groups. The formulation of standards; in-depth cooperation with the blockchain research working groups of the Central Bank, Internet Finance Association, Payment and Clearing Association, Financial Information Committee and other organizations to carry out research on related topics.

Those who keep integrity and innovate will advance.

WeBank will actively respond to the innovation-driven development strategy of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, use financial technology innovation to promote financial services to the real industry, and continue to use financial technology innovation methods to continue to enhance risk control capabilities, improve risk control levels, and improve service efficiency. Reduce financing costs, resolve corporate financing problems, support small, medium and micro enterprises, and promote the transformation and upgrading of real industries, thereby promoting high-quality development of the real economy.