Huawei has announced its ‘Non Stop Banking’ initiative. Unveiled at the Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit for Africa 2023, the initiative calls for hand-in-hand cooperation between the ICT and banking sectors and facilitating a digital future of ‘non-stop’ services, ‘non-stop’ development and ‘non-stop’ innovation.
According to Leo Chen, president of Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa region, going digital has become such an important necessity for the banking industry. Not only does it make it easier for banks to broaden their customer base, but it also saves operational costs, enables them to develop new products and deepen customer relationships, thereby generating revenue for banks.
In Africa, he added, there is an even greater need for banks to embrace digitization as it enables greater financial inclusion.
Chen praised the innovative work of many African banks in embracing digitization, but he pointed out that all industry players must go further if they are to embrace the “non-stop” approach that will mark the future of banking.
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Huawei has already served more than 2,500 financial customers in more than 60 countries and regions, including 50 of the world’s top 100 banks. Numerous Huawei technologies, Chen said, are helpful in this area. Over the years, it has provided the foundation and backbone for the digitization of the banking sector in Africa by supporting the construction of the continent’s ICT infrastructure and digital connectivity in rural areas.
Its extensive focus on research and development (R&D), meanwhile, means it is well placed to also help the industry shape its future.
From a technical perspective, he pointed to Huawei’s strengths in storage, fiber optic networks, IP networks and data communications, which enable multi-domain collaboration solutions for banks.
For example, the storage and optical link coordination (SOCC) solutions can reduce the system’s switchover time from two minutes to two seconds after a network failure, so there are no transaction interruptions.
The multi-layer ransomware protection technology (MRP), meanwhile, can provide 6-layer protection, from storage to network, to applications and other layers. It enables reliable and secure end-to-end protection for the entire system. Finally, Huawei’s intelligent network O&M solutions enable faults to be detected in one minute, diagnosed in three minutes, and resolved in five minutes.
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In addition, Huawei Cloud, the world’s fastest growing major cloud service provider, can support the hybrid multi-cloud service required by banks. Huawei’s digital energy solutions, meanwhile, can help provide uninterrupted and green power for the banking industry. This effectively addresses power shortage issues and supports non-stop banking.
That kind of technological innovation will be important because, as Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Global Digital Finance noted, financial services are becoming mobile and intelligent at a rapid pace.
“The financial industry must pay acute attention to users and embrace their demands and changes,” he said. “Huawei is committed to helping its African financial customers address challenges and accelerate change in six areas: shift from transaction to digital engagement, cloud-native and agile businesses, data democratization, secure and reliable infrastructure, hybrid multi-cloud and Lego-like modular services and automated and predictable operation.”
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“In this way, Huawei will facilitate financial digitization and innovatively improve productivity in Africa. Huawei revolves around stability, agility and intelligence and strives to build ‘non-stop’ financial services and achieve ‘non-stop’ development in addition to ‘non-stop’ innovation,” he added.
In addition to technology, Huawei called on all parties in the industry to come together and build a more robust ICT infrastructure, facilitate more measures and policies to encourage digital financial innovation, cultivate a healthy innovative ecosystem and more digital talent for educate the industry.
Huawei is mainly active on the last two points. For example, Huawei Cloud’s Spark program has pledged to help 1,000 SMEs over the next three years. And having already trained more than 80,000 digital talents in Africa, it has launched the ‘LEAP’ digital talent training program in the Sub-Saharan Africa region, aiming to train an additional 100,000 people in the next three years .
The Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit for Africa 2023 brought together more than 200 attendees, including key industry thought leaders, as well as executives from major banks across Africa.
