领驭框架在全球FinTech创新大会上谈银行转型

For the first time in China, the world-leading FinTech innovation event Money 20/20 took place in Hangzhou on Nov 14-16, 2018. The whole global financial industry with its thought leaders and industry experts came together to exchange new ideas, explore business opportunities, and shape the future of money.

Bank Transformation is one of the main themes. For banks to remain relevant whilst facing disruptive innovations from FinTechs, TechFins and challenger banks, they must undergo drastic transformation of culture, organizational structure and technology infrastructure.

In his keynote speech "Bank of the Future", Ronit Ghose, Global Head of Banks Research, Citi, talked about the ABCs of digital disruption in finance - Artificial Intelligence, Big Tech, Core Banking & Cloud, and Digital Assets. Legacy core banking systems were often developed by product and run on IBM mainframes. This creates vertical silos and a complex web that's not interoperable. They are stable and reliable, but are costly, slow and not nimble, which hurts the speed to market and ultimately the customer experience.

How do banks transform their core banking systems?

Later Ronit hosted a Panel Discussion as the moderator on "Bank Transformation". The two guest speakers were Yanming Cao, CEO of Framework Software (Beijing) Ltd., a Beijing-based FinTech start-up, and Andy Li, Founder & CEO of Silot, a Singapore-based FinTech start-up. 

Framework Software provides model-driven tools that help automatically convert core banking COBOL programs to modern programming languages such as Java.

Silot provides pattern-driven product that transforms structured and unstructured data into banking knowledge in a faster and more scalable way.

Yanming said that his company's flagship product, Creator Business Foundry (CBF), is an unique offering in the market for legacy core banking system transformation. It can save huge cost and the result is not just yet another group of siloed systems written in some new programming language, but rather an integrated set of data models and business capabilities.

Shandong City Commercial Banks Alliance is one of Framework Software's customers in China. The Alliance is the IT backbone of over 30 Urban Commercial Banks and Village Banks in Shandong province. The increasing demand from business organizations puts great pressure on core banking development. Yet the development approach is very rudimentary - it's based on text editor. Inevitably it is slow and inefficient.

With Framework Software's CBF tool, the Alliance is able to convert thousands of core banking COBOL programs into models automatically, and use the visual modelling tool to maintain these models and make changes to them if required. The development process becomes much simpler and more efficient. As a result, development and maintenance cost has been reduced dramatically.

In addition to being able to improve application development productivity 10 times, the model-driven approach brings another key benefit. For the first time in business application development history, an application no longer needs to be coupled with a specific technology, e.g. Java or COBOL. A business application is an application that defines the data models, business processes, and UI flows. It does not need to specify which technology it has to be implemented with. The application hence can evolve independent of technology evolution.

A business application that's independent of technology? This is very innovative idea.

The case at Shandong City Commercial Banks Alliance is a great example of how to leverage modern technologies to transform banking. It's time for banks to tackle its decade-old legacy core banking systems - as the technology is readily available now.