SOFAStack helps financial institutions with digital transformation
SOFAStack is used by dozens of financial institutions, including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Bank of Nanjing, Zhejiang Rural Credit, China CITIC Bank, and PICC Health. It is a market leader for distributed middleware in the finance industry.
Customer value
A June 2020 Total Economic Impact (TEI) report by Forrester shows that SOFAStack delivers significant business value.
Quantifiable benefits
92% reduction in developer training costs
80% increase in application development efficiency
90% savings in O&M labor costs
Non-quantifiable benefits
Increased revenue from the ability to support sudden business surges
Resource savings from elastic scaling
Ensured compliance and high system availability
Improved employee experience
Bank of Nanjing
Business challenge
In response to the rise of new internet technologies, traditional banks are accelerating their digital transformation by making major adjustments to their platforms, products, internal management, and business strategies. This shift has ushered in a new era of fintech revolution. After joining the "trillion-yuan club," Bank of Nanjing embraced Internet finance and big data, choosing fintech as the key to its transformation.
The bank's online business grew as much in one year as its offline business had in the previous ten. This exponential growth in new services created high concurrency demands and massive data volumes, placing increasing demands on the system. The bank needed to quickly improve its system's ability to support the business. The traditional architecture faced significant scalability challenges with online concurrency, online storage, and batch processing. Monolithic architectures were expensive and slow to scale. The system's heavy reliance on the database for atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) transactions created a performance bottleneck. Additionally, the system architecture and development model needed to adapt to integrate basic banking products with various scenarios involving consumers (B2C), businesses (B2B), and industry peers. The bank needed to support fast integration, rapid launches, and quick iterations to meet the demands of internet-based scenarios.
Solution
In 2017, Bank of Nanjing adopted a financial-grade distributed transaction architecture that included the SOFAStack distributed architecture, the OceanBase distributed database, and a big data platform. The bank used these components to build a new core for Internet finance and launched the "Xinyun+" Internet finance platform in November of the same year.
Customer benefits
The "Xinyun+" Internet finance platform provides highly innovative financial services. These services require extreme agility, scalability, security, and business continuity. The platform also needs to integrate with traditional core banking systems. Built on the SOFAStack Scalable Open Financial Architecture and the OceanBase distributed database, the new platform represents a complete distributed architecture transformation of system construction, development models, and O&M. To date, "Xinyun+" has served millions of users across multiple banks. The average loan disbursement time for each customer is just one second, and the platform processes up to one million orders per day.
Zhejiang Rural Credit
Business challenge
Solution
Zhejiang Rural Credit's financial-grade Platform as a Service (PaaS) platform uses a two-region three-data-center architecture for high availability. It uses SOFAStack's Antstack Plus to abstract the infrastructure layer. This abstraction layer allows the platform to work with various heterogeneous resources, such as Huawei Cloud, virtual machines (VMs), and physical servers. This capability enables unified scheduling and orchestration of resources and applications and supports dual-mode deployment for both containerized and classic applications. The bank completed the cloud migration and distributed transformation of four key business systems, including its payment mid-end. The bank used the PaaS platform's capabilities to connect with traditional on-premises systems, ensuring stable production during the transition period while multiple frameworks coexisted.
Customer benefits
Implemented a financial PaaS platform to complete a comprehensive distributed architecture transformation.
Achieved traffic "divide-and-conquer" while meeting financial network security and control requirements.
Connected to heterogeneous resources to achieve automated provisioning.
Advanced from active-standby multi-zone disaster recovery to a regional two-region three-data-center architecture for global high availability.
Integrated with the bank's existing frameworks to transition smoothly to a unified Ant distributed development framework.
Jiangxi Rural Credit
Business needs
For many years, Jiangxi Rural Credit had built numerous business systems based on a traditional, centralized Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture. The ESB played an important role in the bank's IT development and external services. However, with the rapid development of digital technology in finance, the 20-year-old traditional ESB architecture could no longer meet the bank's business needs.
Cloud-native architecture, a cutting-edge technology, is gaining popularity among financial customers because it can accelerate requirement delivery, reduce O&M costs, and ensure business continuity. Service Mesh, an emerging cloud-native technology, solves interoperability issues between multiple programming languages and technology stacks. It provides a fast track for migrating traditional applications to a cloud-native architecture.
Solution advantages
Smooth, non-intrusive cloud migration: Migrate to the cloud smoothly at a low cost without modifying business code or managing dependencies.
Heterogeneous service governance: Includes service throttling, message throttling, and service routing.
Improved observability: Provides end-to-end tracing and multi-dimensional monitoring.
Flexible architecture evolution: Extends the SOFARPC framework to be compatible with ESB services, enabling interoperability between new and old applications.
Shunde Rural Commercial Bank
Business needs
Shunde Rural Commercial Bank, in partnership with Alibaba Cloud and Ant Group, began migrating its first batch of core business systems. These systems include Internet finance, Type II and Type III bank settlement accounts, and online credit. The goal was to gradually move these business systems from a traditional IOE architecture to the Finance Cloud platform.
Solution
After forming a strategic partnership, Shunde Rural Commercial Bank accelerated its comprehensive digital transformation. By adopting Alibaba's Apsara cloud computing operating system, the SOFAStack distributed middleware system, the OceanBase distributed relational database, a financial data intelligence platform, the bPaaS financial core suite, and the mPaaS Mobile PaaS, the bank gradually built a fully distributed, financial-grade technology architecture. This architecture covers everything from the underlying data center to upper-layer mobile applications and laid a solid technical foundation for a compliant workload migration of its core business.
Customer benefits
Transformation: Accelerated the company's digital transformation while ensuring production security. Completed the cloud migration of core banking systems at a low cost and achieved an autonomous and controllable cloud platform architecture.
Innovation: Eliminated information silos through unified planning of bank-wide business capabilities. This improved product innovation efficiency, enhanced service quality, and boosted the customer experience.
Efficiency: Used technologies such as containers to improve deployment efficiency and reduce deployment risks. This allowed the bank to fully leverage the technical benefits of a cloud-native architecture.
Using the Saga pattern for distributed transaction orchestration, the bank developed low-code business logic by orchestrating atomic services. This significantly reduced business development time and complexity. It also accumulated many reusable atomic services for the mid-end.
Using container services, deployment speed was reduced from five minutes on VMs to just over ten seconds.
Security: Built a high-availability, active-active multi-zone disaster recovery architecture on a cloud-native foundation. This reduced single points of failure and enhanced risk control capabilities.
Sichuan Rural Credit
Business challenge
The existing IT systems have effectively supported business operations for some time. However, the current IT environment faces significant challenges in meeting future business growth demands. The main challenges are as follows:
Challenges with traditional architecture
The next generation of banking systems must serve a massive number of customers from diverse backgrounds, which brings an enormous volume of transactions and data. This is a common technical challenge for the banking industry. Distributed architecture and cloud computing are the recognized solutions. Key features of distributed systems, such as high scalability, high processing efficiency, strong fault tolerance, and low total cost of ownership, effectively address the performance bottlenecks of traditional architectures and meet the high reliability requirements of the financial sector.
Limited rapid response capability
With the rapid adoption of the mobile Internet, customer behaviors and preferences have changed dramatically. The banking business is also evolving. Business departments are becoming more specialized, and new models such as the platform economy and sharing economy are driving innovation in financial service models. These trends place new demands on the support capabilities and responsiveness of core systems. The architecture and technical capabilities of traditional core systems have become a bottleneck, limiting the scope and speed of product innovation.
Increasing demand for business continuity
The traditional two-region three-data-center approach for cross-data-center expansion and cross-region disaster recovery cannot effectively handle the increase in business load across regions. In terms of cost, the disaster recovery system is only used during a disaster, which leads to low resource utilization and high costs. In terms of disaster recovery capability, the cold standby of the disaster recovery system results in ineffective recovery and high switchover risks.
Upgrading the operating model
China's interest rate liberalization reform is largely complete, and market competition in the banking industry is intensifying. Cross-industry competitors from the Internet finance wave have entered traditional financial fields such as payments and financing. This has significantly impacted the traditional branch-based operating model of commercial banks. The changing competitive landscape means that banks now, more than ever, need a more powerful delivery platform to support a large-scale, efficient, and low-cost new operating system.
Therefore, the Provincial Rural Credit Union aims to use this project to migrate off its mainframe. By building a distributed cloud platform, it aims to resolve the various problems with its current IT architecture. The goals are to achieve rapid application deployment, optimize application performance, improve application efficiency, simplify O&M, and increase availability.
Solution
The distributed cloud platform project enables the complete cloudification of business application systems and the migration of core systems off the mainframe. It allows for a rapid response to business requirements and ensures the stable and fast growth of the rural credit business. It also meets the high availability and security requirements of regulatory authorities. This will allow the rural credit cooperative to join the top tier of its peers, better address the needs of rural areas, agriculture, and farmers, and achieve inclusive finance. The main objectives are:
Follow the overall goal of 'secure, reliable, autonomous, and controllable.' Gradually adopt autonomous, secure, and controllable technology platforms and architectural solutions to ensure IT architecture stability and information security.
Rapidly develop new business platforms for services such as the mobile Internet. Further promote market-oriented reforms to drive business development and innovation.
Customer benefits
The project achieved the following technical goals:
Completed the IaaS layer of the cloud platform
Completed the 'one cloud, three zones' setup. This means a unified cloud platform manages cloud resources and services in the development and testing zone, the DMZ, and the internal network zone.
Prepared compute, storage, and network resource pools for deploying new systems to the private cloud. The resource pools can be smoothly scaled to support the migration of existing x86 and minicomputer systems to the cloud.
Established cloud management features to meet the personalized requirements for cloud services throughout the application lifecycle in both development/testing and production zones.
Managed compute, storage, and network resources in a centralized, service-oriented manner. This allows for rapid, elastic allocation to support upper-layer applications. For each corporate credit union, this enables pay-as-you-go cloud computing.
Built the infrastructure and productivity tools to support a cloud-native application architecture.
Completed the PaaS layer of the cloud platform, building an ecosystem for distributed systems and implementing a distributed cloud-native architecture
Implementing a distributed cloud-native architecture requires continuous innovation in technical specifications, infrastructure, productivity tools, and organizational processes:
A development and runtime platform for distributed architecture is needed. It must integrate and encapsulate interfaces for distributed databases, distributed caches, microservice frameworks, and service management and deployment processes. This supports the development and management of distributed applications and reduces the development costs of distributed application projects.
Implemented a DevOps system to support the distributed architecture. This improves development and testing efficiency, enhances deployment efficiency, reduces risks, and strengthens collaboration between teams, breaking down the barriers between development and O&M teams.
For O&M of distributed application systems, a set of O&M tools is essential for managing large-scale distributed database clusters. These tools must provide automated deployment, unified metric and log monitoring, an O&M management console, database version rolling upgrades, and canary releases. This automates O&M, provides necessary tools, reduces difficulty, and improves efficiency.
Achieved a distributed active-active architecture from the application to the data layer
The next-generation IT architecture built by Sichuan Rural Credit is benchmarked against industry best practices and ensures the ability to continuously iterate and evolve. It achieves 'two-region three-data-center active geo-redundancy.' The active-active mechanism covers the access layer, application layer, and data layer. A corresponding traffic scheduling mechanism is established at the access layer, and a disaster recovery switchover mechanism is built on the active-active architecture.
Established an enterprise-level architecture specification system
Unified technical specifications were formulated at the provincial credit union level. These specifications standardize, guide, and govern the daily work of each application project team to ensure that the plans are implemented and executed effectively.
MYbank
Business challenge
MYbank's mission is to provide inclusive finance. It aims to use innovations in internet technology, data, and channels to build a 'distributed cloud ecosystem' architecture. This will lay the foundation for sustainable architectural evolution, help address the financing difficulties for small and micro enterprises, and resolve the lack of rural financial services, thereby promoting the development of the real economy.
Solution
The bank's core system was developed based on the SOFAStack Scalable Open Financial Architecture and the OceanBase distributed database. This gives MYbank the ability to handle high-concurrency financial transactions and massive big data. It also provides elastic scaling and active geo-redundancy capabilities. By leveraging the advantages of the internet and big data, MYbank provides financial services to more small and micro enterprises.
Customer benefits
MYbank's information system is built on SOFAStack's mature and fully 'autonomous and controllable' technology system. Combined with its asset-light, transaction-oriented, and platform-based operating model, MYbank completed its distributed cloud computing architecture. Throughout this process, it made a series of technical architecture innovations to improve system throughput capacity and resource supply efficiency. This enhanced system reliability, achieving 24/7 service capability and 99.99% availability.
For big data risk control, the bank performs offline computing on over 200 TB of data daily. Its online computing achieves real-time risk control with millisecond-level latency. The bank implemented an active-active architecture across three regions and five data centers for all its services, with data unitization. It is now exploring data elasticity and hybrid deployment.
China Continent Insurance
As the property and casualty insurance industry faces new development trends and the rise of new technologies such as cloud computing and fintech, China Continent Insurance sought to accelerate process re-engineering. It aimed to move scenarios and customers online, integrate online and offline channels, and improve fine-grained management and intelligent operations. These efforts were intended to ensure the company achieves its strategic development goals.
Solution
China Continent Insurance's new, fully distributed core system uses a complete set of Alibaba Cloud's Apsara Stack platform, data mid-end, Business Mid-end, and Ant Group products. It also innovatively incorporates Ant Group's public platform. This is the first time in the insurance industry that a core system has been built on a hybrid cloud model. The solution includes the Apsara cloud computing operating system, the SOFAStack distributed middleware system, the OceanBase distributed database platform, a financial data intelligence platform, the bPaaS financial core suite, insurance expert services, the mPaaS Mobile PaaS, and financial DingTalk. This suite of products, technologies, and services helped China Continent Insurance move from a traditional IOE architecture to a new-generation, fully distributed core system. This accelerated its journey toward autonomous control and digital transformation.
Customer testimonials
"During the pandemic, the online claims resource management system, which was quickly deployed on the cloud, provided our customers with one-stop services such as remote, contactless, and fast online claims. For one auto insurance customer, the entire process from access to damage assessment was completed in just 2 minutes and 58 seconds. The auto insurance claim payment arrived in 15 minutes."
"In early March this year, the intelligent integration project was launched as a pilot in Hangzhou. This was a solid step toward transforming our sales model. As of early June, the renewal rate for household car insurance in Hangzhou increased by over 6%, the first-day quotation rate increased by nearly 9%, and the premium diversification rate increased by about 4%. The pilot results have been excellent."
"In the past, upgrading our company's business systems often required several hours of downtime for deployment. Now, it can be done in as little as 10 minutes."
PICC
Business challenge
The People's Insurance Company of China Health (PICC Health) is the first professional health insurance company established with the approval of the State Council and the China Insurance Regulatory Commission. Within the insurance industry, PICC Health was the first to propose the 'health insurance + health management' business philosophy. It has built a complete protection chain that includes 'basic + major illness (supplementary medical) + medical assistance + long-term care + health management.'
Currently, PICC Health has established an end-to-end medical risk control mechanism and a stable, convenient, and efficient professional operations management platform. In recent years, the company's professional and technical capabilities have improved rapidly, placing it in a leading position in the professional health insurance market. To support the transformation of its business to an internet model, PICC Health urgently needed to build a new-generation E-commerce platform based on an internet architecture.
Solution
Using technology products such as the SOFAStack Scalable Open Financial Architecture and the OceanBase financial-grade distributed database, PICC Health built a new-generation internet insurance cloud core business system. This system is the first of its kind in the industry and is benchmarked against top industry standards, heralding a new era for the internet insurance business.
PICC Health's new-generation E-commerce platform is benchmarked against top industry standards. It incorporates basic software from Ant Group's distributed transaction architecture and uses multiple new technologies such as microservices, distributed databases, and containers. Since its launch on April 18, 2018, the system has successfully met the demands of the internet insurance business for rapid iteration, high concurrency, and elastic scaling. It has supported the rapid growth of the company's 'Good Doctor' insurance business. As of the end of April 2021, the new-generation E-commerce platform had processed over 500 million transactions (including new policies, renewals, and re-insurances), with an average of nearly 800,000 transactions per day and a peak of 1.5 million transactions per day.
Customer benefits
PICC Health's new-generation internet insurance cloud core business system supports high-concurrency business needs. Compared to the original E-commerce platform:
Processing capacity has increased by over a thousand times and supports elastic scaling. The policy issuance speed has reached 1,000 policies per second, which is among the top in the health insurance industry. For example, for the 2018 'Good Doctor' hospitalization medical insurance, the processing time for a daily settlement file of 10,000 policies was reduced from 4 hours to 6 minutes.
The efficiency of integrating products from external channels has increased by 6 times, supporting the rapid expansion of third-party business.
The time to launch new products has been reduced by over 80%, from several weeks to just a few days. This ensures innovation and rapid market response for the internet business.
Platform service availability has reached 99.99%, allowing customers to enjoy PICC Health's insurance services at any time.
Zheshang Securities
Business challenge
As the internet market matures, dividends are diminishing and the cost of customer acquisition is rising. The growth rate of internet users was below 10% for six consecutive years, falling to 5.6% year-on-year at the end of 2018. In response, securities firms are increasing their online promotion efforts, strengthening channel partnerships, and launching intensive marketing campaigns to acquire more customers. The retail business of securities firms is returning to its core focus: service. This means being user-centric and providing responsive, high-quality customer service.
Solution
Zheshang Securities collaborated with Hundsun Technologies, Alibaba Cloud, and Ant Group to define the technical path for implementing a distributed architecture. Based on this new architecture, they built an internet user center business system. The user center supports the use and management of customer information across the entire group. This enhances the value of customer information, strengthens the data and system foundation, and is driving Zheshang Securities' comprehensive transformation toward being 'user-centric'.
Customer benefits
Unified management: The user center, based on registered internet users, uniformly manages user data from terminals such as apps, WeChat, and websites. This achieves data sharing and administration for users across all internet terminals, solves the problems of information silos and data fragmentation, establishes company-wide service standards, and provides unified user authentication and access.
Unified identification: With the goal of 'central registration, unified identification, and real-time sharing,' it implements a service mechanism for 'central registration of key customer information, unified identification of identity information, and real-time sharing of critical information.' It provides real-time, complete, consistent, and authoritative user data for all application systems.
Faster transactions: Starting with the gradual decoupling of the retail brokerage business, the user center progressively enriches user information by classifying users as browsing users, registered users, wealth management users, trading users, and professional investment users. It gradually separates user information and account services from business systems for unified management, allowing the order processing system to focus more on transaction channel services.
Reduced risk: As the sole, authoritative source of user information for application systems, the user center is responsible for the unified management and distribution of user information. As the single entry point for user information collection, it provides consistent user data management. This fundamentally prevents the risk of inconsistent information for the same customer across different accounts and systems, meeting regulatory requirements for customer information uniqueness.
Tianhong Asset Management
Business challenge
Currently, Tianhong's systems use multiple technology stacks, resulting in a siloed architecture. The efficiency and completeness of technical support for the business are low. To support the continued growth of Tianhong's Assets Under Management (AUM), the company aims to build an efficient, complete, flexible, compliant, stable, and sustainable basic technology architecture.
Solution
Establish technical standards to improve technical support efficiency
Unify the technology stack across the entire site, including front-end and back-end development frameworks, R&D processes, deployment processes, and monitoring.
Establish a business-layer application service architecture with clear hierarchies and boundaries.
Build a hybrid cloud architecture to balance business flexibility with regulatory requirements
Establish a hybrid cloud architecture where business runs on the cloud and control is managed on-premises.
Deploy major business on the cloud and sensitive business on-premises. Achieve unified O&M, control, and disaster recovery for both cloud and on-premises environments.
Build system disaster recovery capabilities to enhance technical support stability
The architecture must support multi-zone and cross-region disaster recovery capabilities for Tier 1 business systems, and multi-zone disaster recovery for Tier 2 business systems.
For batch processing services, disaster recovery metrics must align with Multi-Level Protection Scheme (MLPS) Level 3.
For online services, disaster recovery capabilities must achieve extremely low Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), especially for investment and trading services.