David Shi, President of Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group, Middle East, says rapid growth of the financial industry offers tremendous opportunities for tech players
Huawei has worked with the global financial industry for over a decade, says Shi
The Middle East financial services industry has seen rapid digitalisation over the past couple of years.
The urgent need for digitalisation has been further enhanced due to the pandemic as demand for online banking services increased significantly. With bank branches being physically shut due to lockdowns, customers have shifted to online platforms to fulfil their banking needs.
According to a report by Allied Market Research, the global online banking market was valued at $11.43bn in 2019 and is projected to reach $31.81bn by 2027.
This rapid growth of the financial industry offers tremendous opportunities, but also presents new challenges caused by unconventional disruption and new competition. Non-banking companies are now able to bring different business models and expertise in customer experience to the financial services sector.
Financial services post-pandemic
In the post-pandemic period, there are five major challenges faced by the financial services industry: digitisation, agility, risk control, cybersecurity and the lack of customised solutions.
• Digitisation: Branch services and payment systems are required to be digitised to reduce time-consuming interactions, offer customised products and shift towards digital payments and cashless transactions.
• Agility: The pandemic has prompted banks to build agile capabilities across IT infrastructure, software development, products and business lines to serve customers and maintain operations while protecting employees.
• Risk control: Lockdowns have inevitably led to a decline in asset quality. The financial industry needs more efficient risk management, including credit risk and business continuity risk.
• Cybersecurity: Online transactions and interactions have increased significantly with the wider use of mobile apps during the pandemic. With the growing cybersecurity threats, implementing fraud detection and scam prevention programmes are vital.
• Lack of customised solutions: Worldwide, big tech firms are fast adapting their extensive capabilities and resources to meet the financial industry’s needs.
Huawei’s I5 Framework
Huawei has worked closely with the global financial industry for over 10 years. There are three strategic initiatives for our work in the financial sector: fully embracing cloud-native technology, diversifying and improving use cases within the industry, and aggregating SaaS products to help financial institutions become better digital enterprises.
Huawei recently unveiled its I5 framework for accelerating the financial service industry’s digitalisation, especially for banks:
• Robotic infrastructure – a green, secure, simple and agile infrastructure that consists of data storage, networking, computing and power system
• Agile innovation – a cloud-native 2.0 stack that is ‘’application-centric’, including Operator Service Centre (OSC), Application Service Metric (ASM), Multi-Cloud Platform (MCP) and Cloud Container Engine (CCE) turbo, enabling financial institutions to deal with multiple scenarios, full-process security and trustworthiness, app modernisation and full-stack data intelligence.
• Data intelligence – a system that ensures all stacks are being intelligent and secured with high performance, low latency and a high usable ratio in the lifecycle of data.
• Financial inclusion – a solution that includes digital payment, wallet and microfinance that helps banks to reach more unbanked people and businesses, especially SMEs.
• Industrial finance – a mechanism that leverages IoT, 5G, blockchain and other innovative technologies to allow banks to have ‘always-on’, secured data management ability to access the full process of their financial activities across multiple locations and devices.
We are confident that as new technologies emerge, working with the right partners, the future looks bright for financial services industry innovation.
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By ITP
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Driving the next wave of banking innovation
David Shi, President of Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group, Middle East, says rapid growth of the financial industry offers tremendous opportunities for tech players
Huawei has worked with the global financial industry for over a decade, says Shi
The Middle East financial services industry has seen rapid digitalisation over the past couple of years.
The urgent need for digitalisation has been further enhanced due to the pandemic as demand for online banking services increased significantly. With bank branches being physically shut due to lockdowns, customers have shifted to online platforms to fulfil their banking needs.
According to a report by Allied Market Research, the global online banking market was valued at $11.43bn in 2019 and is projected to reach $31.81bn by 2027.
This rapid growth of the financial industry offers tremendous opportunities, but also presents new challenges caused by unconventional disruption and new competition. Non-banking companies are now able to bring different business models and expertise in customer experience to the financial services sector.
Financial services post-pandemic
In the post-pandemic period, there are five major challenges faced by the financial services industry: digitisation, agility, risk control, cybersecurity and the lack of customised solutions.
• Digitisation: Branch services and payment systems are required to be digitised to reduce time-consuming interactions, offer customised products and shift towards digital payments and cashless transactions.
• Agility: The pandemic has prompted banks to build agile capabilities across IT infrastructure, software development, products and business lines to serve customers and maintain operations while protecting employees.
• Risk control: Lockdowns have inevitably led to a decline in asset quality. The financial industry needs more efficient risk management, including credit risk and business continuity risk.
• Cybersecurity: Online transactions and interactions have increased significantly with the wider use of mobile apps during the pandemic. With the growing cybersecurity threats, implementing fraud detection and scam prevention programmes are vital.
• Lack of customised solutions: Worldwide, big tech firms are fast adapting their extensive capabilities and resources to meet the financial industry’s needs.
Huawei’s I5 Framework
Huawei has worked closely with the global financial industry for over 10 years. There are three strategic initiatives for our work in the financial sector: fully embracing cloud-native technology, diversifying and improving use cases within the industry, and aggregating SaaS products to help financial institutions become better digital enterprises.
Huawei recently unveiled its I5 framework for accelerating the financial service industry’s digitalisation, especially for banks:
• Robotic infrastructure – a green, secure, simple and agile infrastructure that consists of data storage, networking, computing and power system
• Agile innovation – a cloud-native 2.0 stack that is ‘’application-centric’, including Operator Service Centre (OSC), Application Service Metric (ASM), Multi-Cloud Platform (MCP) and Cloud Container Engine (CCE) turbo, enabling financial institutions to deal with multiple scenarios, full-process security and trustworthiness, app modernisation and full-stack data intelligence.
• Data intelligence – a system that ensures all stacks are being intelligent and secured with high performance, low latency and a high usable ratio in the lifecycle of data.
• Financial inclusion – a solution that includes digital payment, wallet and microfinance that helps banks to reach more unbanked people and businesses, especially SMEs.
• Industrial finance – a mechanism that leverages IoT, 5G, blockchain and other innovative technologies to allow banks to have ‘always-on’, secured data management ability to access the full process of their financial activities across multiple locations and devices.
We are confident that as new technologies emerge, working with the right partners, the future looks bright for financial services industry innovation.
Follow us on
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