With banks embracing new technologies to remain flexible in the new normal, Huawei recently hosted the next generation Intelligent IP Infrastructure conference to highlight the need to adopt an evolving business model and the customer-centric approach for the next decade.
Event speakers were King Tsui, chief architect for Global Financial Industry of Huawei Enterprise Group and Henry Aguda, chief technology and operations officer and chief transformation officer of Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank).
The conference was held amid the onset of new technologies such as 5G, Ai, IoT, and SuperAPP which have stimulated the innovation of new-generation “banking-on-everything” services, all seen to bring huge amount of data.
In order to survive, banks need to implement fast connection and high-performance processing, and use AI technologies to flexibly build an All-Ethernet and intelligent-based cloud architecture.
Huawei underscored how it can provide a scalable, high-performance, and low-latency intelligent network to help customers achieve service-driven digital transformation.
Tsui highlighted the importance of an intelligent IP infrastructure, and how it can support the needs of financial institutions in the next decade.
“Intelligent IP is the foundation for today and for the next 10 years. 5G is pretty much ready also to replace or upgrade any existing architecture. It’s a good time to keep moving forward,” Tsui said.
Meanwhile, Aguda said that financial institutions are only as fast as their infrastructure and one key component of this infrastructure is the network.
“In the Philippines, there are challenges in terms of having good internet connection and this is what we’ve partnered with Huawei to do,” Aguda said, adding that during the lockdown, around 260,000 new customers signed up with UnionBank’s digital app.
UnionBank’s upgraded infrastructure also paved the way to launch game-changing products such as the retail bond system, AI for chatbots, and voice assistance.
“We’ve also been able to launch new products. Such as the retail bond system that was offered a month back. We are confident that we have the network infrastructure to handle as much traffic as we can. We’re jumping immediately to our AI initiatives,” Aguda said.
Most of all, the partnership with Huawei paved the way for UnionBank to have secure transactions with its customers at the comfort of their homes.
“We are grateful to Huawei because through our partnership, our customers can do banking transactions from the safety of their homes,” Aguda said.
UnionBank is the Philippines’ best digital bank and has been leading the way in banking transformation.
Huawei has been a major partner of UnionBank’s digital transformation journey, especially on its network transformation.
UnionBank is collaborating with Huawei to implement an intelligent network transformation project in the next five years.
After completion of Phase 1 of the program, the bank and Huawei are now moving on to Phase 2 or the software define network (SDN) and artificial intelligence(AI).
Huawei designed a network architecture based on the best practice approach for finance which is resilient, agile, and future-proof.