China Guangfa Bank invested 3.7 billion yuan in technology in one year to deepen transformation and strengthen data governance

Author | Ho Yat-chan

Curated | Luo Yanshan

In the face of global economic uncertainty, China Guangfa Bank Co., Ltd. maintained stable financial performance in 2023 and actively pursued its digital transformation strategy. According to its latest annual report and social responsibility report, the total assets of China Guangfa Bank have entered the 3.5 trillion mark, and although the operating income has decreased to 69.678 billion yuan compared with 2022, the net profit has increased to 16.019 billion yuan. In addition, the balance of non-performing loans and the ratio of non-performing loans both declined, and the core Tier 1 capital adequacy ratio was 9.11%, which was at a high level in the past five years.

China Guangfa Bank regards digital customer acquisition and digital operation as the focus of its business development, and clearly puts forward the transformation strategy of "digital Guangfa" and "ecological Guangfa", with the goal of basically building "digital Guangfa" by 2025, and "ecological Guangfa" has begun to take shape, forming a competitive "C, G, B" ecosystem (C-end life, G-end social and public governance, and B-end industrial interconnection). In 2023, China Guangfa Bank will invest a total of 3.732 billion yuan in technology, a year-on-year increase of 0.67%, accounting for 5.36% of operating income, showing its continuous investment in promoting digital transformation.

Top-level design leads the transformation

According to McKinsey's analysis in the China Banking Value Creation Survey, the average net interest margin of commercial banks fell to a historical low of 1.69% at the end of 2023, and the significant decline in net interest margin also led to negative growth in bank income. In this winter of growth, commercial banks should not only scatter the application of financial technology, but also form a large-scale digital transformation system, which puts forward higher requirements for the top-level design of the transformation system of commercial banks.

In this transformation process, China Guangfa Bank further improved its organizational mechanism and formulated the "2023 Digital Transformation Work Plan of China Guangfa Bank", focusing on the core topic of "digital business capacity building", organizing and promoting the front-end business, middle and back office operation and management departments to formulate special action plans in key areas, and incorporating indicators such as digital customer acquisition into the assessment system to form a digital capability evaluation system.

In order to strengthen the overall management of digitalization, China Guangfa Bank has formulated the "1+3" Rectification Plan for Strong Management of Information Technology", which strengthens the governance of science and technology from four aspects: top-level design, network and data security management, whole-process control of science and technology lines, and management of credit card centers and branches, and establishes a data security governance system in which the "top leader" is responsible for the overall responsibility, grasps the level at each level, and implements it at all levels, and strengthens the whole-process control of science and technology lines.

In order to spend money on the cutting edge and let digitalization truly help reduce costs and increase efficiency, it is necessary to improve the scientific and technological innovation management system at the strategic level. China Guangfa Bank has set up a financial technology innovation committee, set up an innovation fund, and set up a professional team, forming a set of linkage innovation mechanisms from customer demand mining to idea incubation, implementation and promotion, so as to quickly cultivate and effectively promote innovative projects. Through the creative access mechanism and dynamic evaluation system, the return on investment of digital products and ecological cooperation projects is strictly controlled to ensure the effective use of resources.

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Strengthen data governance capabilities and empower comprehensive data applications

For banks, data governance is highly related to business, and the quality of data directly affects whether digital technology can truly serve the business, so the foundation of digital transformation is the construction of data governance capabilities. The Guiding Opinions of the General Office of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission on the Digital Transformation of the Banking and Insurance Industry require banks to comprehensively build data capabilities from four aspects: improving the data governance system, enhancing data management capabilities, strengthening data quality control, and improving data application capabilities.

Focusing on improving the quality of regulatory data, China Guangfa Bank has established a problem classification and marking rectification mechanism and an enterprise-level data quality inspection platform, realized closed-loop management of data quality monitoring and improvement in the fields of EAST, anti-money laundering, and 1104, and also used artificial intelligence to assist in building an enterprise-level data standard control system. At the same time, customer information, as an important data asset element of the bank, has also been highly valued by China Guangfa Bank. By formulating customer key information data models and standards, China Guangfa Bank has comprehensively improved its customer information control and application capabilities.

In terms of building a digital foundation, China Guangfa Bank has promoted IPv6 transformation to ensure that the Internet services of the three centers in the two cities have the foundation of IPv6 dual-stack capabilities. Build a multi-cloud resource management platform and adopt the "Infrastructure as Code (IaC)" framework, improving the efficiency of resource delivery by more than 50%; Promote the construction of an intelligent operation and maintenance system, complete the upgrade of the centralized monitoring platform, and fully support the monitoring of key components such as the core of distributed banks.

In terms of data platform capacity building, China Guangfa Bank has expanded the data sharing scenarios of its branches, enabling more than 2,000 data tables to be deposited into the data lake of its branches. The bank uses a "service + self-service" model to provide customized data sharing services to 35 branches. At the same time, the privacy computing platform of Datalink has been optimized, and the joint intersection and modeling technology has been used to achieve accurate customer activation, with a total of about 900,000 active customers and 1.42 million new consumptions, and the platform has reached the level of industrial-grade products in the industry.

On the basis of data, computing power and platform, China Guangfa Bank has strengthened the comprehensive application of data, and improved the cycle system of "seeing, using, evaluating and governing" the value of data by establishing a "lakehouse" big data platform, accelerating the application of data services in diversified business scenarios and enhancing data-driven business decision-making capabilities.

Build a digital product matrix to support business innovation

In order to create a "second curve" for customer expansion and business growth, China Guangfa Bank has built five series of digital product matrices serving enterprises, trade unions, justice, education, and people's livelihood. In terms of retail business, China Guangfa Bank has made key progress in the retail "Smart Brain" project, and promoted the "E Shopkeeper" APP, an all-in-one all-in-one tool with full view, in its branches. Build a digital customer service ecosystem that integrates "scenario + finance", serving more than 9 million customers, with an annual growth rate of 48%; At the same time, it launched version 9.0 of mobile banking, and the transaction volume of its online platform increased by 44% year-on-year, with more than 7.5 million monthly active users.

In terms of credit card business, China Guangfa Bank has built the "E-Seconds" credit card field business development platform, released the "Discover Wonderful 8.0", integrated the diversified operation process of credit cards, and established an "end-to-end" one-stop operation capability from contact point management, activity and card issuance strategy deployment to effect evaluation, helping the coverage of operation scenarios to exceed 70% and improve operation efficiency by 30%.

In terms of corporate business, China Guangfa Bank has launched a series of "GF Tong" products, such as digital human resources (GF Payroll), digital finance and taxation (GFC), and digital travel (GF), covering 90% of the electronic channels for corporate customers, realizing the integration of banks and enterprises, information flow and capital flow. Completed the second phase of the construction of a new generation of corporate customer relationship management system (CRM), strengthened the intensive operation and maintenance management of public products, and realized system customer management.

In addition, it is worth noting that the distributed banking core system of China Guangfa Bank was successfully put into operation in May 2023, which can quickly respond to various needs of retail, corporate and financial institutions, and promote business model innovation. The development of the system is based on the distributed technology platform independently developed by China Guangfa Bank, and the domestic database is used to realize the one-time overall switching of the bank's core business functions.

Digital talent and culture, two-wheel drive

At the end of 2023, China Guangfa Bank had a total of 2,199 information technology personnel, an increase of 5.06% from the beginning of the year, accounting for 5.95% of the total number of employees in the bank.

China Guangfa Bank pays special attention to the cultivation of fintech innovation culture when cultivating digital talents, and taps grassroots digital innovation talents and improves employees' digital capabilities through competitions such as the 4th Cyber Security Attack and Defense Skills Competition, as well as special training such as GF Lecture Hall. Launched the FinTech Talent Certification Program, driving more than 1,800 learners across the bank, and a total of 542 certified digital product managers.

China Guangfa Bank has also applied the digital system to human resource management, built a "data quality supervision dashboard", and established a standard system for human resources information. It has built a human resource cockpit platform including human resource view and cadre portrait tools, and launched digital ecological service tools for human resource view and cadre portrait to provide data support for talent selection and evaluation.

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Original link: China Guangfa Bank has invested 3.7 billion yuan in science and technology in a year to deepen transformation and strengthen data governance_Enterprise News_He Yican_InfoQ Selected articles