Rural commercial banks based in counties and rooted in “Sannong” have always been the main force serving “Sannong”, small and micro enterprises, and urban and rural residents, and are an important part of my country's financial system.
In recent years, the country has comprehensively promoted rural revitalization and accelerated the modernization of agriculture and rural areas. At the same time, it has attached great importance to the digital transformation of the financial industry. In particular, the "14th Five-Year Plan" and the 2035 long-term goal outline have clearly stated that it is necessary to "steadily develop financial technology and accelerate financial development." Digital Transformation of Institutions” and the People’s Bank of China issued the “Fintech Development Plan (2022-2025)”, requiring the financial industry to carry out digital transformation, promote the development of inclusive and green finance, serve the real economy more effectively, and facilitate Chinese-style modernization. These initiatives have put forward new requirements for the digital transformation of rural financial institutions.
So, as a provincial-level rural credit union that manages, guides, coordinates, and serves rural commercial banks within its jurisdiction, how is the digital transformation done?
With this question in mind, the Shandong Rural Credit Cooperative Association (hereinafter referred to as "Shandong Rural Credit") came into our sight. We interviewed Wang Jinbao, deputy director of the Development Center of the Information Technology Department of Shandong Rural Credit The digital transformation progress of Sannong.
Business needs drive digital transformation
Since the reform of my country's rural financial institutions in 2003, financial institutions in the rural commercial banking system have now occupied most of the rural credit market and have a comparative advantage in regional business shares. As an important part of rural revitalization, the digital transformation of rural commercial banks can overcome the problems of high cost, low profit and high risk of traditional financial institutions, and provide diversified financial products and services for agricultural entities by reducing information asymmetry, effectively alleviating the The "last mile" problem of financial services enables underdeveloped areas, rural areas, small and micro enterprises, and low-income groups to obtain reasonable-value, safe and convenient financial services.
Shandong Province Rural Credit Cooperative Union was established in June 2004 to perform the functions of management, guidance, coordination and service for Rural Commercial Banks in Shandong Province. At present, there are 110 rural commercial banks, 4,762 business outlets, and 67,000 employees. It is the financial institution with the most business outlets and employees, the widest range of services, and the largest capital scale in the province.
Along with the expansion of business scale and the development of new businesses, Shandong Rural Credit Corporation is facing the pressure of rising operating costs and increasing customer service requirements. The informatization construction of Shandong Rural Credit Co., Ltd. is oriented by business needs, providing fast, reliable, continuous and agile IT service support, and more effective internal control and risk management, making information technology a booster for business development. At the same time, the rapid development of Internet finance and scene finance has also prompted Shandong Rural Credit Corporation to constantly think about how to use cloud computing, big data, AI and other IT technologies to provide better financial services and realize digital transformation.
According to Director Wang Jinbao, the digital transformation of Shandong Rural Credit Corporation is directly related to business needs. In the field of agriculture, rural areas and farmers, customers have urgent needs and high requirements for timeliness. However, traditional financial technology projects have many construction links and long cycles, and it is difficult to guarantee the timeliness of rapid product launch. How to improve product research and development efficiency and customer service capabilities is the key to Shandong Rural credit digital transformation is an urgent task.
The digital transformation of Shandong Rural Credit Co., Ltd. solves the last mile of rural financial services
Based on these considerations, Shandong Rural Credit Co., Ltd. comprehensively uses financial technology methods such as "cloud, big, material and intelligent transfer" to precisely "drip" financial "living water" to the rural industrial chain, aiming to solve the "last mile" problem of rural financial services.
On the whole, by continuously promoting the deep integration of business and technology, Shandong Rural Credit Corporation has built the overall structure of the project construction of "one body, two wings, four guarantees" and the project construction mode of "project team system", which has realized the double improvement of project construction quality and efficiency. Created a provincial information technology platform covering core business, operation management, e-banking, payment and settlement, supporting and benefiting farmers, intermediary business, risk prevention, regulatory support and other fields, which met the differentiated business needs of multiple legal persons and built a unified The characteristic business cloud platform and the Internet access cloud platform have expanded the channels for the establishment of characteristic businesses and further enriched the means of supporting and benefiting farmers.
Among them, there are two technologies that are the key applications in Director Wang Jinbao's eyes.
One is supply chain financial technology. The rural area is a supply chain mainly formed by agricultural products. For example, Shandong Rural Credit Corporation provides financial services for the whole industry chain including planting, production and sales, payment collection and other agricultural products such as vegetables and ginger. How to provide related services with higher quality and faster speed to help promote industrial revitalization is a key business requirement of Shandong Rural Credit.
The second is big data technology. Analyzing the financial needs of all social strata and groups through big data can improve the added value and service stickiness of financial products, accurately locate service targets and provide precise financial services, solve the dual goals of financial institutions’ business operations and rural revitalization, and effectively promote an effective connection between the two.
From the perspective of technical architecture, supply chain financial technology and big data technology are more application-oriented technical systems. How to provide support for the stable and efficient application of these two technologies? water surface.
Shandong Rural Credit Private Cloud Platform, creating a base for digital transformation
There is no doubt that cloud computing technology can build a powerful digital infrastructure for financial institutions, relying on the advantages of basic technology to promote effective cost control, agile demand response, efficient elastic expansion, etc., and promote the iterative development of financial business innovation.
Through the construction of a private cloud platform, Shandong Rural Credit Corporation has gradually realized the transformation of the IT architecture of the regionalized Rural Commercial Bank's business operation system to platform-based and mid-platform. By building an IaaS resource service capability shared by the whole society and a comprehensive financial service platform, combined with the service-oriented capability building of the "multi-tenant" model, while providing flexible and universal financial service capabilities for multi-level legal entities, create personalized financial services service product.
In order to implement the concept of independent innovation, Shandong Rural Credit Co., Ltd. launched the cloud migration project of related infrastructure construction and business in due course. Based on the practice of one-cloud multi-core technology route, combined with the concept of one-cloud multi-state construction, a cloud platform of one-cloud multi-core technology stack including multiple chip technologies has been built at the IaaS resource layer, and multiple self-sufficiency has been completed at the database and middleware level. The application of R & D products, 40+ items of system transformation work, supporting multiple business functions and systems such as intelligent risk control, abnormal business investigation, customer service platform and STM intelligent self-service equipment system have achieved cross-resource and cross-platform deployment and application.
Since the launch of the cloud platform, Shandong Rural Credit has achieved good results, which are reflected in three aspects.
The first is the improvement of system operation security capabilities: the multi-active capability of the cloud platform supports the multi-active and disaster recovery deployment of application systems. According to regulatory requirements, three centers in two places and three centers will gradually realize three live activities in the same city and different places for key businesses.
Second, the overall utilization rate of IT resources has been effectively improved: the integration and sharing of resources has been successfully realized, and the original server equipment and storage equipment have been managed in a unified manner to form a unified, dynamic and on-demand IT resource pool, and the entire set of resources has been intelligentized Monitoring and operation and maintenance, effectively integrating existing resources, reducing the average cost by 40%, increasing the average resource utilization rate by 100%, building many test environments, and gradually completing the migration of the financial production system to the cloud, solving the problem of multiple business types and capacity expansion Difficult problems, improve the overall utilization of IT resources.
The third is the acceleration of business iteration: through resource integration, after the utilization rate of IT resources has increased, Shandong Rural Credit can quickly complete the development, testing and launch of new business systems with the help of a large-scale test environment, making the business iteration capability enter the "fast lane" , can significantly accelerate business innovation, provide customers with richer financial services, and bring economic benefits.
The R&D and testing cloud in the Shandong Rural Credit Cloud platform system and the production cloud built at the same time have completed the practice of the one-cloud multi-core technology route. With the help of the concept of immutable infrastructure, Shandong Rural Credit has built a comprehensive system that runs through R&D, testing, and production. The basic operating system image and container image, as well as the intelligent operation and maintenance management process, ensure the consistency and security of application runtime in multiple environments. It is a typical practice of the coexistence of multiple technology routes and the concept of immutable infrastructure in the financial industry.
One cloud with multiple cores solves the complex management problem of credible key business
In the construction process of Shandong Rural Credit Cloud Platform, the adoption of "one cloud with multiple cores" technology can be described as a bright spot.
The so-called "one cloud with multiple cores" refers to the management of chip clusters with different architectures through a set of cloud platforms to realize the unified scheduling, maintenance and management of resources under the background of the development of multi-technology routes in financial technology, and to solve complex IT management for financial business applications on the cloud problem. Among them, "cloud" generally refers to the IT resource service cloud platform, and "core" generally refers to the computing power under the background of software-defined technology. Shandong Rural Credit One Cloud multi-core solution supports a wide range of CPU, GPU, DPU and other computing power architectures, provides virtual machine resource management, container application hosting and strong bare metal management capabilities, and provides multi-storage services, high availability guarantees, intelligent operation Dimensional services to achieve unified management and integrated scheduling of multiple computing power. At present, gratifying results have been achieved in many aspects.
The first is to complete the integrated management of heterogeneous CPU architectures, including x86, ARM and other CPU architectures. Compared with traditional mainframe and minicomputer technology stacks, it provides a more flexible and open IT basic resource support base. Judging from the current development trend of financial technology, the computing power of x86, ARM and other instruction set architectures will coexist in the financial data center for a long time. Multiple technical routes in parallel to meet multiple business scenarios have become the only way for financial institutions in the IT construction process. According to the characteristics of different types of computing power, building an open IT technology system and carrying out open technology practice has become a general appeal of the financial industry in the process of building a cloud data center. For example, the current generation of core system applications are mostly supported by x86 architecture computing power, combined with virtual machine, bare metal and container technology to form a stable and sensitive dual technology stack support; some office and innovative businesses are gradually trying to use power consumption The lower ARM simplifies instruction set architecture to make innovative attempts to improve the construction of the green financial digital system; at the same time, GPU-based intelligent voice customer service, OCR image recognition, and multi-modal biometric identification platform construction are also the work of Shandong Rural Credit Corporation. One cloud, multiple cores, multiple computing power" The key points considered in the overall architecture design and planning process.
Second, in terms of carrying high-performance transactional applications, such as the application scenario of distributed database technology, the agile management and deployment of x86 and ARM architecture bare metal resources in the cloud have been improved, and the front-end and back-end separation construction and distributed distribution of large-scale core applications have been effectively guaranteed. In the context of system expansion, there are technical requirements for agile operation of resource services, interoperability of resources in the cloud, and horizontal expansion of computing power resources.
Third, in the process of building a new generation of cloud data centers, cloud storage service capabilities should have both capacity expansion capabilities for massive data capacity scenarios and high-performance capabilities supported by key applications; at the same time, it is also necessary to meet cross-computing capabilities under the trend of resource-intensive construction. shared storage resources. Relying on business application scenarios, while building a flexible and shareable distributed cloud storage resource pool and a low-latency centralized storage resource pool based on multiple types of CPU processors, Shandong Rural Credit Bank also explores for traditional financial services and innovative businesses. Provides a service-oriented key storage support system.
Although the one-cloud multi-core cloud platform technology is a new concept produced in the evolution of financial technology in recent years, it is basically consistent with the traditional x86 technology system in terms of practical construction and use. At the same time, under the sensitive demands of financial technology Complemented cloud native technology. At present, Shandong Nongxin's cloud computing support system built around the concept of one cloud and multiple cores includes traditional IaaS layer service capabilities such as computing, storage, network, and security, and forms an overall cloud service base of "cloud computing + big data + artificial intelligence" . In addition, Shandong Rongxin has also completed the unique R&D management system and talent echelon construction under the one-cloud multi-core scenario, and has accumulated rich experience in cross-architecture financial product compilation and cross-infrastructure business application migration.
The digital transformation of Shandong Rural Credit Co., Ltd. started from the needs of "agriculture, rural areas and farmers" and ended with the original intention of supporting, benefiting and assisting farmers. Taking the last mile of rural financial services well and using technology to help rural revitalization will surely become a financial A characteristic business card for the digital transformation of the industry.