In a survey commissioned by Alibaba Cloud earlier this year dubbed “Digitization in Financial Services,” it was revealed that one of the financial services industry (FSI)’s top priorities in the Asia-Pacific region is to accelerate multi-cloud migration, increase automation, and build analytics platforms.
The survey was conducted between January to March this year and targeted more than 60 business and IT leaders from leading banks, financial services, and insurance companies in the region.
To address these priorities, Alibaba Group’s digital technology and intelligence backbone thus launched its latest suite of financial services solutions to help advance the digitalization efforts of FSIs.
The suite is comprised of over 70 products that have been designed to ensure that banks, as well as insurance, securities, and fintech companies, can use an easier migration platform when they digitalize their operations.These solutions can support every stage of an FSI’s digital journey and provide easy access to cutting-edge cloud-native technology.
Together, the suite is seen to deliver five core capabilities covering over 20 business scenarios and can help drastically improve an FSIs’ operational efficiency, customer experience, security, and compliance. These core capabilities include:
- Robust and elastic cloud infrastructure to enable FSIs to effectively manage their day-to-day operations and the expansion of their digital applications via build-in cloud governance capabilities
- Security and compliance solutions to give FSIs the confidence that they are operating in compliance with regional and industry-specific security and regulatory requirements.
- Agility in business application development, which is achieved through a wide range of financial-grade cloud tools, middleware, and distributed database products for developing cloud-native applications. It also gives FSIs the ability to manage workloads in a scalable and flexible way through Alibaba Cloud’s public and hybrid cloud platforms, multi-cloud environments, or their own premises.
- Digital onboarding and servicing to leverage various Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and hybrid cloud deployments in support of mobile and digital operations, remote video-based sales platforms, and an electronic Know-Your-Customer (eKYC) solution to help FSIs verify and onboard users online any time and from any place.
- Customer insights generation and analytics solutions to harness AI, blockchain, machine learning, and data analytics to help FSIs analyze and visualize omni-channel digital engagement intelligence, aiding the discovery of customer insights and enabling intelligence-driven decision making.
In a press release, Raymond Xiao, Head of International Industry Solutions and Architecture of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said, “Our new solutions have been built in response to growing demand from FSIs around the world for cloud products capable of accelerating digitalization and enhancing the customer experience.”
“By leveraging our extensive cloud capabilities and industry know-how,” he adds, “we have developed a comprehensive suite of solutions that can help advance growth and innovation in the finance sector. We look forward to further expanding our product offering as well as the geographic coverage of our services to support more FSIs in the future.”
Helping FSIs overcome challenges, meet their priorities
Alibaba Cloud’s financial service solutions are designed to help FSIs overcome challenges and meet their strategic priorities.
For instance, China CITIC Bank International (CITIC), a leading Hong Kong-based commercial bank, has been looking for ways to enhance its flagship mobile banking platform “inMotion.” By leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s Mobile Platform-as-a-Service (mPaaS) solutions, CITIC’s remote banking services as well as real-time eKYC and video-based sales are now operating seamlessly on its customers’ mobile devices without any geographical restrictions.
Rapidly growing FSIs are also seeing value from cloud solutions.
GCash, a leading mobile wallet enterprise in the Philippines, recently partnered with Alibaba Cloud to overcome the challenges their platform was facing from a rapid user base expansion. GCash adopted a mix of solutions, including eKYC, IaaS, ApsaraDB RDS databases and Object Storage Services to scale their operations and accommodate the traffic spike during the pandemic. The fintech company also adopted security products such as Web Application Firewall and Anti-DDoS to protect their platform from DDoS attacks and other threats.
“The Philippines still has a large unbanked population and one of our goals is to offer a digital life that enables democratization of access to financial services like savings, credit, insurance and investment. With Alibaba Cloud’s solutions, we have the ability to operate on a secure technology infrastructure that can scale in real-time and keep pace with the customers seeking new ways to transact,” said Mark Frogoso, GCash’s Chief Information Security Officer, in a press statement.
Touch ‘n Go Digital (TnG Digital), a Malaysia-based company providing mobile e-wallet services, required secure, agile, and scalable technology to support its business growth. Through Alibaba Cloud’s Elastic Compute Service, Content Delivery Network (CDN), and EMAS Mobile Test solutions, TnG Digital was able to expand its services effectively. The e-wallet provider also leveraged Alibaba Cloud’s Database Backup Services and PolarDB solution to reduce backup time and ensure peak performance during traffic spikes.
“Alibaba Cloud’s dedicated support team actively responds and provides high-quality support services, helping TNG Digital find quick solutions to any problems around the clock. In addition, their cutting-edge cloud technology and security solutions enable TNG Digital to meet regulatory requirements and deliver products to market faster,” beamed Leslie Lip Mun Foong, CTO of Touch’n Go Digital.