| In the past two years, the word "Internet finance" has become very popular. When it comes to the information system architecture of the financial industry, it seems that it is very low without mentioning this word. So, is this term, like other concepts, "fooled" by IT manufacturers or consulting firms? Really not. The author has communicated with many friends who work in banks. Up to now, quite a few state-owned banks, joint-stock banks, and commercial banks have engaged in Internet finance business, or regard Internet finance as a key work content. Therefore, in the matter of Internet finance, IT and consulting vendors are not "fooling", but just cooperating. |
In the past two years, the word "Internet finance" has become very popular. When it comes to the information system architecture of the financial industry, it seems that it is very low without mentioning this word. So, is this term, like other concepts, "fooled" by IT manufacturers or consulting firms?
Really not. The author has communicated with many friends who work in banks. Up to now, quite a few state-owned banks, joint-stock banks, and commercial banks have engaged in Internet finance business, or regard Internet finance as a key work content. Therefore, in the matter of Internet finance, IT and consulting vendors are not "fooling", but just cooperating.
The Essence of the Financial Industry and the Necessity of Internet Finance
Among all IT vendors, the financial industry is the most important and most valued traditional industry. So, what is the nature of finance? Have you ever considered it?
That's what finance is all about: acting as an intermediary. For example: David wants to buy a second-hand house with Sam. The process should be: After David and Sam agree, David pays the deposit through bank transfer, goes to the bank to apply for a mortgage, makes a down payment through the bank, and after the bank approves the loan, make a deposit. The final payment, and finally the house was handed over, and then David entered the long bank to repay the loan every month. In this whole process, the bank acts as an intermediary, and everything is related to it (the real estate intermediary is also indispensable). Then, let’s consider a problem. If David and Sam are very familiar with each other, have a high degree of mutual trust, and David is rich, David will directly pay Sam the house in full in cash (or in installments, plus Pay interest to Sam), then all the links in the middle will be gone, and there will be no bank. This is called financial disintermediation. "Disintermediation" generally refers to skipping all middlemen when making a transaction and going directly between the supply and demand sides. "Financial disintermediation", also known as "financial disintermediation", is called "Financial Disintermediation" in English.
In the matter of financial disintermediation, what has the Internet done? It played a role in fueling the waves. The Internet provides a search platform for both the supply and demand of funds, acts as an intermediary of fund information, and the financing transactions are completed by both parties themselves. In addition, the third-party payment platform provided by the Internet provides down payment, transfer, payment and other functions for both parties to the transaction. Ultimately promote the formation of an intermediary financial market.
While financial disintermediation is intensifying, on the other hand: after the country liberalized deposit interest rate controls in 2014, the traditional profit model of banks relying on deposit and loan spreads is unsustainable, and the competition in the traditional model of banks has fallen into a red sea model. Banks urgently need to expand their business types and innovative business models to increase profitability.
That is to say, what the banking industry needs to face at the moment is not only the homogeneous competition in the same industry, but also the cross-border competition of the Internet. In this case, if the bank does not make changes, unless the state issues an administrative order prohibiting the Internet industry from getting involved in the financial sector and setting up high barriers to protect the bank, in fact, the state’s document is:
Therefore, from the perspective of the current industry, the financial industry, especially banks, must vigorously develop Internet financial services.
In fact, not only banks, but also the Internet has launched an attack in the financial and insurance industries. At present, Alibaba has already sold insurance, and you can see it through the Alipay client:
Internet finance business model
Next, let's look at the main business models of Internet finance. At present, there are mainly five Internet financial business models in the banking industry:
- Third-party payment mainly involves cooperation between banks and third-party payment institutions. The latest news is: CCB and Alipay will realize mutual recognition and mutual scanning cooperation, ICBC and WeChat QR code mutual recognition and mutual scanning.
- In terms of P2P network loans, such as online banking to purchase wealth management, stocks, etc.
- Big data finance. Banks can analyze customers' credit ratings through their own internal data analysis, or with the help of big data from third-party organizations, to achieve rapid loan approval and rapid increase in credit card limits.
- Internetization of traditional services. Child repayment services refer to services such as wealth management products, precious metal transactions, and payment of utility bills, etc., which are realized through the mobile app of mobile banking. There are three ways to realize the Internetization of traditional services: 1. Bank direct sales banking 2. Docking with WeChat Bank, Alipay, etc. 3. Provide service terminals such as transfer payment and social chat.
- The core of the Internet financial portal is "search + price comparison". Such as Xingye's "Qianda shopkeeper", Rong 360 and so on.
Speaking of this, add a concept of "direct banking". At present, many banks are vigorously developing direct sales banking, and some banks even set up a separate direct sales banking department and list it independently.
Direct banking is a new type of banking operation model that emerges at the historic moment in the Internet age, and a new type of financial product under the Internet financial technology (FINTECH) environment. Under this business model, the bank has no business outlets and does not issue physical bank cards. Customers mainly obtain banking products and services through remote channels such as computers, emails, mobile phones, and telephones. Since there are no outlet operating and management fees, direct selling banks can provide Customers provide more competitive deposit and loan prices and lower handling fee rates. Reducing operating costs and giving back to customers are the core values of direct banking.
Let's take a look at the direct banking page of Industrial Bank (http://directbank.cib.com.cn/):
Industrial Bank’s direct sales bank provides customers with a wealth of investment and wealth management products such as Zhiyingbao, fixed term, wealth management, funds, and Industrialbao. It supports direct online purchases of multiple bank cards, and the operation is simple and one-click purchase.
Let's take a look at the mobile client of Bank of Jiangsu's direct banking:
IT Architecture under Internet Finance
Internet finance has several characteristics: the number of users is uncertain. Strong application personalization and fast iteration. Therefore, Internet financial services generally have two requirements for IT: strong elasticity and short application launch time.
In the traditional physical machine mode, elastic expansion is almost impossible to achieve. In a virtualized environment, elastic expansion can be achieved, but the relative complexity is relatively high. And the time for elastic expansion is usually tens of minutes. In terms of elastic expansion, containers have their own advantages, and usually achieve second-level expansion. With the help of Red Hat Openshift technology, a commercial bank uses Openshift to build direct banking business, which can easily cope with sudden high-volume demand scenarios such as large-scale batch account opening and promotional activities.
Regarding the issue of rapid application delivery, from a technical point of view, CI/CD can greatly speed up application delivery time. Lenovo's internal IT uses Red Hat 's Openshift technology to shorten the application launch time by nearly 10 times.
Specific content reference:
Lenovo Group| Red Hat Container Solutions and Success Stories| The Container Chronicle
Two ways to implement CI/CD
Technically, the best way to implement CI/CD at present is to implement CI/CD based on containers. Such as Red Hat's Openshift. For details, please refer to the article on this official account: full firepower | continuous integration, continuous delivery | 5 minutes to understand a series of typical container application scenarios
Based on Docker technology and kubernetes framework, Openshift provides software-defined network, software-defined storage, rights management, enterprise-level mirror warehouse, unified entry routing, continuous integration process (s2i/jenkins), and unified management console. , monitoring logs and other functions to form a solution covering the entire software life cycle.
But if the customer does not go to the container cloud for the time being due to some considerations, how can CI/CD be implemented more conveniently? It can be done with the help of Jenkins and Ansible Tower.
Jenkins + Ansible Tower implements CI/CD
Continuous Integration (CI) ==> Continuous Delivery (CD) ==> Continuous Deployment ==> Devops
On the premise of not implementing CI/CD through containers, the integration of Ansible Tower and Jenkins can greatly improve the efficiency of code deployment.
The purpose of continuous integration, on the basis of ensuring high quality, is to allow products to iterate quickly. Its core measure is that the code must pass automated tests before it is integrated into the backbone. As long as a single test case fails, it cannot be integrated.
Continuous delivery (Continuous delivery) refers to the frequent delivery of new versions of the software to the quality team or users for review. If the review passes, the code goes into production. Therefore, continuous delivery, continuous delivery is to automate the testing of the software generated by continuous integration.
In the continuous integration phase, Jenkins can deploy code to dev, test, production and other environments by calling Ansible Tower. The environment can be on a physical machine, a virtual machine, or even the cloud.
Then some people may ask, can only Jenkins or Ansible be used for CI/CD, please see the table below:
