What is a future-oriented IT system must be flexible, on-demand, intelligent, and cloud-native.
So, what is a highly available, flexible, intelligent, and service-oriented financial system? Various banks and various financial institutions have different answers to this question.
After the first anniversary of the stable operation of the new core system of my country CITIC Bank's credit card StarCard, the industry discovered that the core system of Chinese banks could do it. This is China's first new-generation cloud-based credit card core business system with independent intellectual property rights, not only for the future systems of credit card business and banking business, but also for other industries.
This article reveals the situation of the project in depth.
Booming credit card business
my country's credit card business has shown a significant growth trend.
As of 2019, the number of credit cards issued nationwide totaled 740 million, a year-on-year increase of 8.7%. Per capita holdings were 0.53, a year-on-year increase of 8.36%. The total amount of bank card credit was 17.37 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12%.
In this general environment, CITIC Bank credit cards have also achieved good results, with outstanding performance in business indicators such as card issuance volume, transaction volume, and business income. As of the second half of 2019, CITIC Bank has issued a total of 74.398 million credit cards. The scale of card issuance increased by 10.95% from the end of the previous year, transaction volume increased by 27.81% year-on-year, and business revenue increased by 19.14% year-on-year.
From the data point of view, the issuance volume, transaction volume, and business income of CITIC Bank credit cards are higher than the industry average, which shows that CITIC Bank credit card business has made progress in market segmentation, differentiated operations, financial services and consumption scenarios, and digital transformation. .
But in the IT core system, what most people don't know is that China CITIC Bank started "preparing for a rainy day" a few years ago. In this step, CITIC Bank credit cards are at the forefront of the industry.
In recent years, the number of credit card issuances and loan balances has increased rapidly, and it is difficult to support the previous system designed with a capacity of less than 5 million cards. This is also the challenge of digital transformation and intelligent upgrade for all industries, which is manifested in the "mix and match" system:
Coexistence of centralized IT system
Chimney IT system
Service-oriented IT system
Cloud-based IT system
From this "mix and match" IT system, it can be seen that the CITIC Bank credit card system is continuously upgraded with the development of new IT technology, which is a "fire-fighting" development. When the cloud-native architecture changes, it must change.
The core is an intelligent open system
Therefore, in 2014, the CITIC Bank Credit Card Center began to conduct extensive internal and external research to find solutions.
After repeated demonstrations of "going out" and "inviting in", through the forward-looking layout and decisive decision of the bank's board of directors, it finally agreed to upgrade the cloud architecture. The core is to lay out the future, build a new generation of credit card system independently, and build an " open system with intelligence as the core " while solving existing problems .
Note that this point of time was at the end of 2016, when the concept of "intelligence" was just popularized and various industries began to try to apply it. This fully proved the adequacy of the CITIC Bank credit card argument and the forward-looking nature of the layout.
The project has formulated detailed business and technical indicators, and the business must meet the "100 million +" level of customer operation and management requirements. Technically, including performance, stability, capacity, scalability, agility, security, etc., it proposes the most stringent indicators in the industry that are higher than the industry level.
In the past five years, the CITIC Bank Credit Card Center and its partners have delivered 126 sets of peripheral systems and 1 set of distributed core systems in accordance with the implementation strategy of "peripheral first, then core". An "open source + custom" solution is adopted here. The application layer uses microservice design and containerized deployment to build a distributed architecture system. The infrastructure uses a large number of Huawei x86 servers, and ZTE jointly developed a distributed database GoldenDB, and uses Hadoop. Big data platforms and components, etc.
After several iterations, repeated tests, and special review and risk assessment by the head office, in October 2019, the system was launched "low-key" and the CITIC Bank credit card system was fully switched, achieving a transformation from 0 to 1. It has been a year since time.
6 new IT capabilities
There are too many remarkable places in the project.
From a business perspective, the overall support for the future business development direction can be demonstrated from the perspectives of strategy, business, and support. From the perspective of digital transformation, the new IT capabilities brought by the core system are summarized as follows.
Customer journey data-driven capabilities : Focusing on the end-to-end customer journey, continue to introduce financial technology methods and methods, innovate scenarios and services, improve user experience, reduce costs and increase efficiency.
Real-time big data service : Relying on emerging technologies, breaking the T+1 time constraint of conventional data warehouses, providing second-level big data service capabilities, and improving business sensitivity.
Microservice architecture : Carry out domain-driven design from a business perspective, with high cohesion, low coupling support, and service development and version iteration on a weekly basis.
End-to-end agile delivery : From the perspectives of service design, agile delivery, engineering governance, test-driven, intelligent operation and maintenance, and information security, the tool platform is introduced to support automated pipeline delivery.
Intelligent operation and maintenance : Relying on full-link monitoring and alarm event processing, it realizes from flow entrance to transaction interface and monitoring, fault location, and timely handling of implementation problems.
Open banking services : Form multi-dimensional openness based on APIs, SDKs, applets, etc., linking, co-building, and sharing banking capabilities to create an unbounded financial service ecosystem.
The latest data shows that the system has successfully carried 110 million account operations and management, and the overall transaction success rate is 99.999%. The peak value of transactions reached 4500 transactions per second, and the average transaction response time was 36 milliseconds, effectively meeting the needs of high-frequency transaction scenarios such as membership days, rush purchases, and marketing activities.
In terms of performance, the production environment has passed the pressure test value of Netlink 4500TPS, which is three times the peak value of Double Eleven. In terms of linear expansion capabilities, 20 x86 microservices deployed in the test environment passed the stress test value of 20,000 TPS, which is twice the peak value of the Double Eleven of domestic major banks.
Unbounded open ecological market
The core credit card system of CITIC Bank has achieved many firsts in the industry.
The first one is deployed on the container cloud platform, the first one adopts microservices and big data architecture, the first one is based on x86 server, the first domestic database supports billions of cards, the first one is based on transaction-level account design concept...
Practice has proved that after a year of business practice, the system has become "the world's leading distributed credit card solution". There are still many things to do in the future. It will continue to introduce new technologies, benchmark international leading Internet companies, and continuously improve the system. The level of intelligence has become an open and borderless technology platform.
After achieving such results, CITIC Bank’s credit card StarCard new core system first anniversary salon was invited from seven core cooperation units including Huawei, ZTE, Red Hat, Jiang Rongxin, Changliang, Tianyang Hongye, and KPMG. Senior representatives, as well as senior executives of the three major bank card organizations including UnionPay, Visa, and Mastercard, the first batch of 11 institutions launched the digital financial "ecological market." According to reports, the future layout of the "ecological market" will follow the "1+N+∞" model, based on the new core system, and around N scenarios such as "risk, market, sales, and operation", and work with partners to create ∞ scenarios. Business format, creating a new financial technology ecosystem with full service, full channel, and full scene coverage, creating infinite new possibilities.
In fact, many details of this project are worth studying. Just choosing a technical route and choosing a partner is enough to write a book. This article intends to convey a message, whether in the credit card field, the financial field, or even in the process of digital transformation in various industries, there is the support of the board of directors, the methodology, the technical partners, the full understanding of the business, and the clear goal planning. And implementation strategy, everything is achievable. In this regard, the core system of China CITIC Bank's credit card has brought more enlightenment. It is necessary to be based on the future to embrace technology and let digitization drive intelligent transformation.
In the future, the CITIC Bank credit card will continue to leverage its advantages in financial technology, and strive to improve the comprehensive capabilities of "new services, new technologies, and new management" to provide people with higher quality, more efficient, more personalized and safe consumer life. Financial services.