ICBC (Asia) ramps up digital investments for cross-border finance

The bank has tapped on Huawei for its growing IT infrastructure needs.

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC Asia) has been steadily ramping up its fintech investments to tap on the booming cross-border finance market starting with Hong Kong, spanning across APAC and eventually the global stage.

The bank is leveraging on the expertise of Huawei who has provided the bank with digital cross-border finance solutions including Digital Multimedia Banking Solution, Safe Financial Cloud Solution, and the CloudFabric Cloud Data Center Network Solution.

The bank’s ‘mVTM system,’ which is based on Huawei’s IP Contact Center solution, allows customers to have video conferences with their financial advisors via the bank’s mobile app to address cross-border service mode issues. Huawei’s ‘Cloud-Pipe-Device-Control’ security protection system also allows for fine-grained security management authentication and verification.

The bank also has plans to roll out desktop virtualisation technology in the near future which will help the bank isolate browsers from service systems and the intranet from the Internet. This technology shields the bank’s ICT systems from cyber-attacks and prevent disclosure of sensitive data such as customer cross-border financing data and global assets data.

Huawei has also provided the bank with CloudEngine, USG Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW), and other devices that feature open architectures, standard network control protocols, and standard interfaces to boost data centre and production backbone network at the network equipment level.

At the controller level, Huawei deploys its Software Defined Network (SDN) controller and Agile Controller based on the open-source architectures, such as Open Network Operating System (ONOS) and OpenDaylight (ODL).

ICBC (Asia) used Huawei's Agile Controller to replace its existing private network architecture and protocols, protecting the bank from vendor lock-in and allows more top-notch ICT companies to participate in the bank's network development, allowing the bank to access the OpenStack-based cloud platform and share computing resources and value-added services across data centers.

“Huawei helped ICBC (Asia) build more open and stable ICT infrastructures,” said ICBC (Asia) general manager of IT department Tang Bin. “With Huawei's solution in place, ICBC (Asia) achieved a major breakthrough in the diversity of DC network products, laying a solid foundation for private cloud transformation in the future.”