Huawei Unveils Intelligent Banking Model
Huawei has introduced a new strategic framework designed to help banks navigate the shift from traditional digital banking to AI-driven services, positioning itself as a key solution provider for the global financial sector's next phase of transformation.
The framework combines two operational cycles: one focused on current digital banking capabilities and another preparing institutions for AI-powered services.
Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Digital Finance Business, believes that artificial intelligence represents the banking industry's next major disruption following the mobile payments revolution of the past decade.
“Over the past decade, mobile payment innovations have fueled digital transformation in banking,” Jason says. “Looking ahead, intelligence is set to be the next game changer, accelerating innovation beyond imagination.”
The timing reflects broader industry concerns about competitive positioning as financial institutions worldwide grapple with how to integrate AI capabilities without disrupting core operations.
Huawei's approach centres on the premise that banks must first strengthen their digital foundations before deploying AI tools effectively.
Digital foundations for AI readiness
The Digital Flywheel component focuses on four interconnected elements that Huawei identifies as prerequisites for AI deployment.
Banks create connections through mobile applications and APIs (application programming interfaces), which generate data that can train predictive models.
These models then power risk management and product recommendation systems, which extend into partnership ecosystems to create additional revenue streams and customer touchpoints.
The AI Flywheel builds on this foundation by introducing autonomous agents that can make decisions on behalf of customers. Rather than customers using banking apps directly, AI agents would handle financial decisions, product selection and service interactions.
“Everyone will have your financial assistant agent,” Jason explains. “It will help you provide hyper-personalised services.”
This shift requires banks to redesign their customer engagement models. Instead of focusing solely on direct customer relationships, institutions must prepare to interact with AI agents that act as intermediaries. The change could fundamentally alter how banks design products and price services.
Financial institutions handle approximately 30% more data annually due to AI development, according to Huawei's analysis. Next-generation innovations, including large reasoning models and AI agents, are expected to create this additional growth engine that builds upon existing digital capabilities.
Infrastructure modernisation and resilience
Huawei's approach emphasises infrastructure resilience as the foundation for both digital and AI capabilities. The company operates in more than 80 countries, serving 5,600 financial customers, including 53 of the world's top 100 banks.
Building on this experience, it has developed what it calls the R-A-A-S framework, which stands for reliability, availability, autonomy and security.
- Zero downtime through continuous operations
- Zero wait times for real-time processing
- Zero-trust security models where no system component is automatically trusted
- Zero-touch operations that require minimal manual intervention
The company announced its Digital Core 5.5 Solution, which incorporates several technical components designed around its 4M methodology measuring application modernisation.
These components include:
- Platform modernisation using cell-based architecture that distributes traffic across smaller processing units rather than entire data centres, reducing system-wide outages and enabling 99.999% high availability
- Database modernisation featuring Huawei's Gauss database system, which the company claims offers 95% syntax compatibility with existing systems and can achieve system throughput exceeding 10,000 TPS (transactions per second)
- Engineering modernisation through a standardised "four phases, ten steps and 36 activities" methodology for core banking system migrations that ensures zero downtime and 100% data consistency
- Operations and maintenance modernisation for rapid fault detection, demarcation, and recovery capabilities
At the summit, Huawei unveiled eight upgraded solutions for active-active data centres to strengthen financial institutions' infrastructure resilience.
The company also introduced two innovative solutions: the New Dorado storage solution, which ensures zero data loss and delivers high compatibility, and an Intelligent Disaster Recovery Platform that can detect issues within one minute and achieve minute-level recovery during major natural disasters.
“We think that in the next 10 years we will move from one app to one agent... Banks have to think about how to deal with the customers' agents because they'll make the decision for the customers”
Data platform integration and partnerships
The company's R.A.A.S. methodology addresses data management challenges that banks face when implementing AI systems.
The framework covers real-time data processing capabilities that achieve millisecond-level performance throughout entire data pipelines, integration of structured and unstructured data sources across all domains, converged platforms that unify data management and sharing, and enhanced user experience for consumers, banking professionals, and IT personnel.
Huawei's Financial Data Solution 5.5 includes partnerships with firms like TrustDecision for real-time fraud detection systems that can make risk decisions within 30 milliseconds using comprehensive data sets rather than structured data alone.
Global expansion and partnership strategy
Huawei has expanded its RongHai partner programme this year to include more than 150 solution partners across three categories: the Superior Solution Development Program, the Intelligent Innovation Program, and the Financial Partner Go Global Program.
The programme enables collaboration with global leading partners, Chinese partners, and local leading partners across different regions to integrate capabilities and expedite localisation of practices and experiences.
To date, Huawei has collaborated with more than 11,000 sales and solution partners in the finance industry worldwide. Services span from consulting and planning through to solutions, platform tools, integration implementation and delivery services.
The company also provides mobile money solutions that have helped more than 480 million customers access banking services across 40 countries, building on experience that began a decade ago in Kenya with the country’s biggest mobile money provider.
“We think that in the next 10 years we will move from one app to one agent,” Jason concludes. “Banks have to think about how to deal with the customers' agents because they'll make the decision for the customers.”
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