The little ant says:

In recent years, more and more leading banks at home and abroad are fully engaged in digital transformation. Digital transformation is the deep integration of technology and business model, and the final result is the change of business model. The bank’s digital transformation is a progressive journey, and the establishment of the Agile capability center is a milestone in the bank’s digital journey, just like the construction of the next generation of digital banking “operating system”.



The banking industry has entered the full digital era, and the digital transformation will move from the 1.0 era of improved customer connectivity to the 2.0 era of agile capabilities. Ant Financial believes that breaking the independent and decentralized system architecture in the past and casting a financial agility capability center supported by distributed platforms will become an important engine for banking institutions’ comprehensive digital transformation and improvement of customer service capabilities.

From November 29 to 30, 2018, the 7th China Small and Medium Bank Development Summit Forum 2018, sponsored by Contemporary Financier All-media Group, Hongru Financial Education Fund and Ant Financial, was held in Guangzhou. The forum focused on the fintech and risk prevention and control of small and medium banks in the new era. About 300 professionals from regulators, joint-stock banks, domestic urban and rural commercial banks and related organizations attended the summit.



Liu Weiguang, vice president of Ant Financial

Liu Weiguang, vice president of Ant Financial, pointed out in his speech that the digital transformation of banks is a progressive journey, and the establishment of the agile capability center, like the construction of the next generation of digital banking “operating system”, is a milestone in the journey of bank digitalization.

He explained, “The Agile capability center fundamentally solves the management efficiency of enterprises, as well as the problems of service terminal and front desk innovation. It can help banks continuously respond quickly, explore, dig and lead the needs of users, improve user experience, reduce service costs, and lead the industry in the comprehensive digital era.”

Once upon a time, the financial industry due to the requirement for reliability and risk management is higher than general industry, and higher cost and risk of the background changes, so they will try to choose and keep driving the construction pattern of the background system stability IT, put a lot of business logic (business) directly deployed at the front desk system, forming the massive front desk system. In this way, business connections are separated from each other, which fails to support the front desk to respond to users’ needs with rapid innovation and reduces user experience.

With the continuous development of IT technology, microservices, DevOps and other technologies have also provided a technical “silver bullet” to achieve agile capabilities. However, partial solutions fail to fundamentally solve the industry-wide agile problem, and the business departments, R&D centers, and data operation and maintenance centers of banks are all looking for directions with a piece of the puzzle.

At the summit, Ant Financial summed up an agile capability center covering multiple dimensions of technology, data and business based on its own practice and shared it with its banking partners to help each banking institution build its own “digital operating system”.

According to the introduction, the Digital Age Agile Capability Center includes the following aspects:

  • Agile Technology Center: the development, testing, governance, operation and maintenance of distributed architecture system involved in the formation of a complete technical platform to support the application of the whole industry. In addition, there are three places and five centers for disaster preparedness architecture, immunization architecture, defense funding security, and continuous, proactive failure detection. These technical capabilities reflect the agility and self-healing ability of ant technology Agility center under distributed architecture, and transform “uncertainty into certainty”.

  • Agile and intelligent center: the intelligent computing of data, data research and development, and data assets are organically combined to form a unified data platform and financial intelligent application for the whole bank. For example, aiming at the eight risk fields of the whole bank, the bank-level risk platform is built to realize the unified risk management, the platform of risk technology, and the planning of risk data.

  • Agile business center: precipitates the core business capabilities of componentization and servitization under distributed architecture, provides platform domain services and open programming interfaces to help quickly build various business products such as deposit and loan exchange and mutual finance. At the same time, it encapsulates the technical complexity of financial level distributed architecture, reduces the learning curve of distributed transformation, and improves the speed of distributed transformation.



Throughout the development of bank digitalization, digitalization 1.0 starts from the mobile terminal and focuses on improving customer connection and business accessibility. According to Liu Weiguang’s analysis, in the digital 2.0 era, banks and other enterprise institutions focus on acquiring the standard technology stack capability of digital native enterprises through distributed architecture, so as to establish three core competitiveness relative to digital native enterprises: With the ability of technical agility, data intelligence driving and business agility, the company aims to build a digital banking “operating system” for the next generation of digital transformation.

Based on these capabilities, in the future digital 3.0 era, banks can build a multi-directional new banking model of ecological cooperation: internal access to business scenarios, external access to enterprises through API Bank, apI-based application ecological market model, and open ecological banking based on financial component operating system.