Source: BanTech think tank
Author: China Bank Software Center Shenzhen Branch Wang Min
. Background and target
With the rapid development of storage media, bandwidth and Internet technologies, overseas financial markets have also changed rapidly, changing the IT system from "usable" to "how to improve market competitiveness." Developing personalized, innovative products, rapid delivery of new functions, and ultimate customer experience has gradually become the core needs of overseas banking systems. At the same time, overseas supervision has increasingly high requirements for bank business continuity, and it is necessary to provide stable and highly available system support; overseas supervision will gradually pass legislation to mandate more comprehensive and systematic data protection; and in terms of the requirements for banks to provide open services, banks will be required to provide more standardized transaction interfaces for external third parties to facilitate quick payment or bank-enterprise docking; in terms of bank financial transaction supervision, there are stricter suspicious investigation and on-site monitoring requirements for transaction customers, counterparties, and transaction legality.
At the same time, with the changes in the external environment such as the Belt and Road Initiative, the epidemic, 5G, trade war, and regional development, the business management structure and IT structure of traditional banks can no longer meet the market's requirements for "new" and "fast" and risk control. In order to achieve the strategic goal of building a global first-class bank in the new era, Bank of China will be built into a digital bank with rich scenarios, online and offline collaboration, extreme user experience, flexible product innovation, efficient operation management, and intelligent risk control. Under the overall strategic requirements of the IT architecture transformation of the Bank of China Head Office, the overseas core banking system uses X86 technology to restructure the original host system. By building technical capabilities such as componentization, platformization, scenarioization, dataization, globalization, and DevOps, it will realize the " digital transformation " of the core banking system, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 Schematic of the overseas core banking system architecture of Bank of China
2. Componentization of business capabilities
system design that strongly relies on strong coupling limits business innovation. System development cannot keep up with the pace of market demand, and excellent business models and business processes are difficult to quickly promote and reuse. For example, promotional activities are often just short-term sprints, and complex product conditions and price combinations will make it difficult for development departments to provide support with quality and quantity within the specified time. The launch of new products is restricted by system changes. In order to realize the ability sharing of overseas business systems, we have established a business capability sharing component pool, aiming to share business capabilities, adopt the DDD field-driven design, and perform the application splitting means of microservice modeling, vertically decompose services and horizontally extract public functions to reduce system coupling. Study the clustering of standardized public capabilities and the rapid assembly solutions for differentiated capabilities in different business areas. It also deposits enterprise-level business capabilities in the form of middle-end components to support the rapid innovation of global financial services and improves the system's ability to respond to changes quickly.
overseas core system divides application components according to business areas. On the one hand, it is based on the global customer information management module and supported by product management as the parameter configuration release component across all application modules. It has refined the components of financial product pricing, user transaction authentication components, and global quota management, charging management, settlement management, exchange management and other types of public processing to form corresponding core components to provide a global unified high-level customer service experience. On the other hand, a global product service system has been established. Each regional branch can learn from each other's advantageous products and rely on the assembly functions provided by product management components to achieve global sharing of product innovation. Finally, general components such as voucher management, heavy air management, customer service center, accounting, reserve reserve , authorization center, and supervision reporting were established to provide a global unified high-level customer service experience and standard back-end management services.The traditional business and innovative applications of deposit, loan, and branch are responsible for the scheduling and business processing of business processes, and the gradually accumulated enterprise-level business capabilities (business components) are packaged in a "building block-style" combination and trigger calls according to the business process. Under this design model, application components can achieve zero risk "plug and unplug", which not only provides undifferentiated and consistent financial services and customer experience for counters, channels, and peripherals, but also provides a quickly customized business function and process management platform based on this to cope with different regulatory requirements and market practices in different countries and regions around the world.
. Application service scenario-based
Scenario-based capacity building of overseas core systems is centered on the process engine and service combination engine of visual assembly as the core. It integrates process orchestration, RPA, blockchain technology , various front-end, AR, VR, wearable devices, face recognition, voice recognition, image recognition technology, big data and other new technologies. With the goal of providing the best profit model, business model and experience model, a scenario-based comprehensive application platform has been established to drive the continuous evolution of overseas business models, simplify the transaction link, and provide a new customer experience. At the same time, in combination with overseas local supervision and market practices, we will accelerate the research and expansion of overseas scenario-based and online service capabilities to achieve overtaking on the curve.
platform first introduces the business model of Internet products into the construction of financial products through pluggable methods, such as injecting business models such as product combination shopping carts, coupons, product bargaining, Internet of Things, QR code payment into traditional bank product business processes. Reorganize the parts of the existing business processes of each product, reduce contacts such as manual intervention, and automatically trigger the process by the system, intelligent monitoring of and automatic recovery. The second is to quickly introduce the previously accumulated enterprise-level capabilities into innovative business scenarios through business components, such as product factories, pricing centers, charging management, blacklist management, risk control, compliance control, reconciliation and accounting and other business components. Change the current situation of unilateral pricing of bank products, lacking market competition and brand awareness. It also integrates services across systems, across banks and unified customers, and promotes cross-bank service interconnection, automated collaboration, and online and offline integration on the basis of meeting regulatory compliance in various regions. Third, through the bank-enterprise docking platform, integrate internal and external resources of the bank and enterprise, and on the basis of continuously upgrading traditional financial services, it will drive financial scenarios with non-financial scenarios and comprehensively increase customer stickiness.
Using this platform, we have quickly innovated a variety of cross-border or overseas scenario-based businesses such as cross-border account opening, cross-border financial management, comprehensive financial management of deposits and loans, deposit-to-loan loans, tuition financial management plans for international students, overseas anti-money laundering KYC, overseas quick payment, Internet of Things file management, casino cash withdrawal, self-service refueling and other cross-border or overseas scenario-based businesses. Provide a rapid incubation environment for overseas business innovation to adapt to the application scenarios of localization and rapid promotion and enhance the competitiveness of overseas markets.
4. Technical capability platformization
. Microservice architecture
Overseas core systems transform from a single architecture to an enterprise-level distributed architecture that supports "large-scale" and "high concurrency" scenarios, build a distributed technology platform, and form management mechanisms such as distributed service registration and release, routing addressing, current limiting and circuit breaking. We have developed a service orchestration engine, visual orchestration tool and data consistency framework. We can introduce system-salvage business capabilities (microservices) into the task list, and then define the call order and failure compensation method through drag and drop. Supports synchronous asynchronous hybrid orchestration to weigh customer experience and performance to maximize the use of cloud computing capabilities to improve response speed, can customize the interaction events between each microservice through parameters, and use SAGA mode to maintain distributed data consistency. It also provides functions such as forward retry, backward , anti-suspension and other intelligent compensation, state machine management, problem diagnosis, manual breakpoint reentry compensation, etc. according to the configuration failure strategy; it provides fast business assembly capabilities, ensuring high availability and data integrity under a distributed architecture. The microservice architecture is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 Microservice architecture schematic
closely connects each business application and business components through a microservice architecture and a loosely coupled customized system access method. Through dual gateways, it provides security certification and pluggable and scalable service combination capabilities, fully integrate business resources, user resources, and product resources, drive the continuous evolution of business models, and optimize the value chain of the banking ecosystem. The platform provides personalized access services for various terminals, bank product docking, third-party payment platform docking, and third-party manufacturer applications, realizing the query, statistics, analysis, data sharing and exchange functions of bank basic data and various information of banks. Equipment is selected for hardware equipment with better openness and versatility; at the same time, in terms of software expansion, system interfaces based on future bank products are provided, leaving sufficient application space for the construction of extended sub-application systems in various countries and regions in the future. Provide more convenient, efficient and excellent connection services for all applications.
.Distributed deployment of data
According to the regulatory requirements of different countries, some require data center data to be isolated by banks, some countries require data not to leave the country, and some regions have centralized data management requirements for different countries in the same region. In addition, there are huge differences in the business volume of overseas branches, and the database needs to be deployed quickly through flexible configuration plans. Overseas core systems adopt the solution of data being deployed with services and being divided into units within the services. The northbound gateway can automatically route to the corresponding service shard through the bank number and customer number; the southbound gateway can route to different types of databases such as TDSQL, ORACLE based on the "OGM data source selection component". The self-developed distributed service scheduling engine ensures the consistency of database data for distributed deployment, so as to meet the data isolation requirements of different countries and regions at different levels. At the same time, it also takes into account the needs of distributed data storage, intensive management and seamless rolling upgrades of applications.
. Globalized batch processing architecture innovation
is to deal with the requirements of globalized system multi-time zone 7x24-hour uninterrupted service and system rolling upgrade. Overseas core systems have abandoned the traditional dual balance model and compete in single-account distributed locks for batch processing steps that automatically process according to the plan (such as interest calculation, automatic charge, etc.). The traditional batch processing of interest-deductible deductions is converted into the first online automatic transaction of each account after the day, realizing seamless docking processing of batch to online; the batch processing steps of backline data service adopt an innovative way to establish snapshots according to the accounting maintenance date to synchronize the data to the decoupling mode of batch subsystem processing. Bank internal processing runs in batch subsystem and does not interfere with each other. And dispersed the pressure on online databases. This mechanism solves the problem of running batches in multiple time zones overseas. It enables overseas core systems to have the global 7x24-hour service capabilities of "no interruption", "full service coverage" and "non-invasive applications".
4. Dual-active mechanism
system adopts the same-city application dual-active AA model, and the main and backup data centers are responsible for user services at the same time, and each other is backed up. This not only ensures the safe operation of the system, but also improves resource utilization to a greater extent and improves the high availability of the system. The core system realizes polling load between computer rooms through the domain name server, which has little impact on the surrounding systems. Database synchronization uses ADG synchronization tool to achieve high availability system dual-activity guarantee in overseas systems.
5. High-performance mechanism
uses multi-level caching strategy to standardize cache management, realize flexible cache configuration, ensure synchronous update of cache data, solve the problem of distributed cache , and improve system throughput and service performance. Through asynchronous processing, the system resource peak cutting and valley filling can be achieved to improve the system's real-time response performance. The system adopts self-developed asynchronous message components to improve the reliability of asynchronous message through persistence; it adopts multi-node loading, multi-threaded consumption method to improve concurrent processing capabilities; when consumption fails, retry, retry times, time interval and other configurations are supported.Improve the ultimate reliability of asynchronous messages; adopt message unique identification mechanism to realize the timeout reset and prevent recurrence of intermediate status messages when is down; through parameterized configuration of delayed sending, multiple processing, thread pool and other functions, improve the flexible processing capabilities of applications in different scenarios.
5. Data governance standardization
Build a unified data standard and management mechanism to improve the intelligence level of data services and data applications. Against the background of the Ministry of Accounting Information formulated the "Enterprise-level Data Model", overseas core banking systems have established a system-wide data dictionary through enterprise model benchmarking, broken the "module wall", established data governance strategies such as data blood relationship tracking, and successfully realized the standardization of data and standardization, and independently developed a complete set of data management tools, effectively improving data service capabilities. At the same time, focus on the difficult issues in the application of branch data such as regulatory reports, and build an overseas supervision and reporting service platform based on the big data platform at the head office. Data warehouses provide common and reusable overseas regulatory reporting data models, providing data reporting support for the analysis layer. The data layer is processed separately according to overseas regions, examples or branches, and provides data layer processing strategies that support rapid reporting to cope with high-timed data needs and increasingly strict banking regulatory requirements in various countries and regions.
simultaneously gathers data from different structures and formats from different application systems, and uniformly collects, models, manages, safe control, processing, and purifies them to form bank data assets and realizes cross-field and cross-industry data integration and knowledge precipitation. Through big data and AI technology, data is analyzed and data is serviced to form a scale effect. Furthermore, with the support of a powerful big data platform, it will also become a powerful tool for collecting and comprehensively processing overseas customer data and intelligently promoting our bank's financial products to global customers, truly connecting online and offline, financial and non-financial services.
6. Demand delivery agile
Overseas core system has built a complete set of large-scale agile practice systems suitable for large-scale projects. The best practices have been deposited into a reusable enterprise-level R&D middle platform, and a group of professional agile coaches and product managers have been trained. has developed the following platforms and tools based on the test pyramid in terms of automated testing:
is a Mytesh platform based on the TDD method. combines the advantages of various test technologies of black box test and the coverage evaluation technology of white box tests, and can form a visual test model and logical view, which can help testers and developers form a common language and complete test analysis. And automatically generate sustainable running test code based on test analysis. The unit test coverage rate reaches more than 85%.
2 is a contract testing platform based on microservice interface testing, with the coverage rate of interface reaching 100%.
is a RF tool based on functional testing, with a transaction coverage rate of reaching 100%.
At the same time, the independently developed enterprise-level DevOps platform opens up the closed loop of product quality through customization, visualization and automation, and deposits best practices into a reusable enterprise-level R&D middle platform to empower agile practices and digital transformation. The self-developed "development, testing, operation and maintenance integrated platform" breaks the original traditional working model, innovates and uses top-down enterprise-level top-level design, realizes the integration of continuous integration of , continuous delivery, user feedback and system optimization, covering the entire project stages such as demand, design, development, construction, testing, deployment and operation and maintenance, and continuously improves the completion quality of each project stage, providing guarantees for the realization of seamless collaboration across teams. The construction principles of rapid flow, rapid feedback, and continuous improvement change the construction concept of controllability, self-service service, built-in quality, global optimization, and open source co-construction, which runs through the entire life cycle of in the construction of project.
3333dms Agile testing system improves quality and efficiency as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 The three-dimensional agile testing system improves quality and efficiency schematic
7. Summary
The overseas core banking system based on X86 architecture was successfully put into operation in overseas branches. The successful implementation of the overseas branch reflects the accumulation of financial technology capabilities of Bank of China's technological innovation and independent research and development. It is an important milestone for Bank of China on the road of digital transformation and domesticization of core systems. Practice has proved that the core system of large distributed banking based on the X86 platform is technically feasible and has obvious benefits. The success of the project not only significantly improved the Bank of China's agile response ability to respond to supervision from various countries, but also improved the business response ability of overseas markets. At the same time, the business model was optimized, and the interconnection was carried out between various industries and business fields was opened, the shared value was amplified, and a large amount of value-added value was formed, providing strong technical support for consolidating and expanding the leading advantages of Bank of China's internationalization strategy, and carrying the "core people"'s technological pursuit of excellence and the spirit of technological exploration that dares to be the first. As the business system with the richest functions, the most complex architecture and the highest operation and maintenance specifications in Bank of China, with equal importance to theory and practice, I have embarked on a unique path of domestic overseas core systems.
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