Liu Guojian, Director of the Technology and Product Management Department at Agricultural Bank of China, Drives IT Architecture Transformation to Build a Digital Bank
GBASE, a China-developed MPP database, powers ABC's big data platform and builds a powerful analytics engine! "Over three years, overcoming multiple technical challenges, we successfully built an enterprise-grade big data platform based on a China-developed MPP database and open-source Hadoop clusters. Currently, the platform spans over 1,000 X86 servers, manages over 5PB of data, and runs over 70,000 daily jobs..."
——Full article from China Financial Computer
Liu Guojian
Ensuring customer fund security and stable production operation is the primary principle of bank IT construction. When planning architecture transformation, we must consider technology controllability, risk controllability, and cost controllability in a comprehensive manner, and advance step by step with the principle of self-reliance and steady progress.
By | Agricultural Bank of China
Liu Guojian, Head of Technology and Product Management
In recent years, with the rapid development of mobile internet, changes in customer demographics and behavior have driven a surge in online business and continuous financial product innovation. Banking is no longer confined to physical locations; financial services are ubiquitous. Increasingly convenient financial services are boosting economic growth. Rapid adoption of technologies such as cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence means that professional services in marketing, wealth management, and risk control — once heavily reliant on experts — can now be handled by more efficient, low-cost intelligent systems. Instant loan approvals are no longer a dream, inclusive finance has become a blue ocean market, and long-tail customers can now access professional financial services.
To meet the demands of rapid business growth and effectively respond to new opportunities and challenges, ABC has launched a strategy to comprehensively build an information-driven bank. Guided by principles of convenient customer service, lean operations management, and integrated information sharing, the bank is coordinating and consolidating business systems, optimizing information system architecture, enhancing business continuity, adjusting business, application, and data layouts to create a group-level converged architecture, and continuously transforming its technology architecture to meet the IT construction requirements of modern banking.
I. The Background of Bank IT Architecture Transformation
Traditional banking, centered on account settlement, has been effectively supported by centralized architectures. However, as banking business models shift — emphasizing customer-centricity and service-centricity, and playing a greater role in delivering personalized, intelligent products and services — and with the disruptive innovations brought by internet finance, banking services are becoming more diverse, products more complex, pricing more flexible, and operations more data-driven. This transformation, while driving integrated business operations, also imposes more demands on bank IT architecture. Information systems must not only support high concurrency, high availability, and high reliability scenarios, but also flexibly and rapidly provide differentiated, personalized products and services, enabling agile innovation and rapid release.
1. Intensified Competition and Surging Business Volume Drive Architecture Transformation
As markets become more open and interest rate liberalization advances, competition in the banking industry is increasingly fierce, narrowing profitability and increasing cost pressure. New technologies are continuously creating new application scenarios, with financial products and services trending toward "micro, high-frequency" interactions. The business volume of bank information systems is surging, and new product releases are more frequent than ever. Rapid business growth, the need to adapt to frequent changes, cost control, and stringent business continuity requirements pose severe challenges to the centralized architecture, calling for a more elastic and cost-effective IT architecture as a supplement.
2. Business Operations and Decision-Making Increasingly Rely on Big Data Processing Capabilities
Rapid product innovation and explosive business growth have led to an explosion of data. Big data analytics capabilities are closely tied to the efficiency of business operations and decision-making. Traditional centralized architectures struggle to meet the demands of deep, multi-dimensional, real-time data mining and analysis. A new architecture featuring distributed computing and stream processing is needed to leverage all types of data, enhancing product innovation, precision marketing, risk prevention, decision analysis, and lean operations.
3. Integrated Business Operations Require More Diverse Application Systems
Financial service scenarios are increasingly diverse. Collaboration among banks, securities firms, fund companies, insurance providers, leasing companies, and other financial service entities is becoming more frequent. Large financial institutions are venturing into new businesses like e-commerce, and their business scope is gradually becoming more integrated. This integration reduces the timeliness and consistency requirements for many scenarios compared to traditional deposit, loan, and remittance services, but raises the bar for inter-system coordination and adaptability.
4. National Financial Order and Sustainable Bank Operations Demand Technology Security
China has become the world's second-largest economy. Globally, the economy has yet to bottom out, and populism and trade protectionism are on the rise; the international situation remains unpredictable. Regulatory requirements are becoming increasingly stringent, and new media accelerate information dissemination, amplifying reputational risks and imposing stricter demands on stable operation and production safety. For banks, which are heavily reliant on IT, enhancing technology security and controllability is not only an internal requirement for sustainable development, but also a top priority for maintaining national financial order stability.
5. Distributed Architecture Technologies Are Becoming Increasingly Widespread and Mature
As single-machine computing power growth has gradually slowed from its rapid pace, the processing capacity of centralized architectures has become insufficient for high-speed business growth. Advances in X86 computing platforms, high-speed networking, and storage technologies, along with a maturing open-source ecosystem and large-scale deployments by major internet companies, have laid the foundation for the widespread adoption of distributed architectures.
II. ABC's IT Architecture Transformation in Practice
Since consolidating national data, ABC has further improved the transaction success rate of its core business systems and business continuity, while product innovation and promotion have become more efficient. Annual business volume growth has averaged over 30%. By the 2017 Spring Festival, the average daily transaction volume was around 400 million, with a peak of over 470 million transactions per day, and the peak business transaction rate exceeded 15,000 TPS. To meet the challenges of the new environment, ABC has been bold in innovation and proactive in transformation, carrying out a series of studies, explorations, and practices in IT architecture transformation and achieving significant results.
1. Building an Active-Active Architecture Across "Two Sites and Three Centers" to Enhance Business Continuity
To further improve the business continuity of ABC's information systems and guard against extreme disaster risks at the head office data center, after extensive technical evaluation, ABC pioneered an active-active architecture across "two sites and three centers" with a "forwarding in the same city, active-active across remote sites" design. The core banking system was extended in a distributed manner to avoid excessive risk concentration. The same-city center only deployed forwarding modules, significantly reducing investment and operational costs. To date, we have largely established a read-write separation architecture for the core banking system across remote sites and an active-active architecture for critical channel systems.
On September 3, 2017, with all channels and services open to the public, we successfully conducted a one-click switchover drill between Beijing and Shanghai for the core banking system (RTO=61 seconds, RPO=0). The drill verified that emergency procedures, switchover operations, and runtime performance all met the design goals of the "two sites, three centers" architecture. Building on this, in 2018 we will complete the active-active architecture transformation for all channel business systems, comprehensively enhancing business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities across ABC.
2. Offloading Mainframe Applications and Data to Slim Down the Core System
Leveraging the construction of a new-generation core banking system, ABC optimized the core business system architecture.
First, the transaction routing layer was separated from the mainframe system, adopting an open architecture for unified transaction access and load balancing, reducing mainframe dependency and resource consumption.
Second, a read-write separation design was adopted to build a converged architecture combining mainframe and open systems, offloading the application logic of query transactions to the open platform. For a single transaction, this offload reduced mainframe computing resource consumption by 74%. Currently, the total daily offloaded query transactions exceed 100 million, saving significant mainframe resources and delivering a notable "slimming" effect.
Third, historical transaction detail data was offloaded to a distributed architecture, enabling historical transaction query services based on Hadoop technology.
Fourth, data replication technology was used to synchronize mainframe data in real time to the X86 platform, with big data analytics applied to unlock data value in real time.
Fifth, some business functions that could be offloaded were moved entirely to the distributed architecture, retaining only essential core functions on the mainframe.
3. Unifying Open Platforms on X86 Architecture with Zero Growth in Minicomputers
As X86 platforms and distributed cluster architectures matured, ABC, after extensive pilots, began replacing minicomputers with X86 servers comprehensively — from application servers to database platforms — achieving architectural simplification, cost reduction, and enhanced security and controllability.
In 2009, the new-generation online banking system's application servers went live fully on an X86 server cluster architecture. In 2011, databases for internal management systems went live on X86 servers. In 2014, the credit system database, handling 40 million daily transactions, was migrated from high-end minicomputers to a China-developed X86 server cluster. Since 2015, all new computing resources on ABC's open platforms have adopted China-developed X86 servers, achieving zero growth in minicomputers. Critical applications such as the new-generation bank card acceptance environment system and third-party express payment systems, each exceeding 50 million daily transactions, have been transformed into multi-active architectures and fully migrated to China-developed X86 servers.
ABC's practice has proved that distributed architectures built on commodity hardware can also deliver high overall availability and processing power.
4. Forging a Big Data Analytics Engine with a China-Developed MPP Database
Since 2013, ABC has actively collaborated with major Chinese vendors. Over three years, overcoming numerous technical challenges, we successfully built an enterprise-grade big data platform based on a China-developed MPP database and open-source Hadoop clusters. Today, the platform spans over 1,000 X86 server nodes, manages over 5PB of data, and handles over 70,000 daily jobs. Adopting an active-active architecture, the platform has largely achieved unified data resource management, improving data resource management levels and comprehensive data asset utilization capabilities, and providing strong support for customer marketing, risk management, operational management, and external regulatory compliance across ABC.
5. Vigorously Promoting Cloud Platform Construction to Enhance IT Architecture Agility
To adapt to flexible and changing business needs and enhance IT architecture agility, ABC started promoting virtualization technology bank-wide in 2010. The adoption rate of virtualization across head office and branches now exceeds 85%. In 2013, we built an infrastructure cloud platform at the head office to deliver cloud services to the entire bank. To date, over 95% of development and testing environments are provided via the cloud platform, and more than 80 production systems are running on it.
The construction and application of the cloud platform have significantly enhanced the standardization, automation, and elasticity of the infrastructure, improving resource delivery quality, shortening delivery cycles, increasing resource utilization, and reducing operational costs. Currently, two new data centers for ABC are about to be delivered. ABC is collaborating with leading Chinese IT companies in joint innovation in the cloud computing domain, developing a new-generation cloud platform that is standards-based, open, agile, and intensively used.
6. Vigorously Promoting Automation Platform Construction to Enhance Intelligent Operations Management
As information system construction deepens, especially with the widespread use of distributed architectures and virtualization technologies, the data center scale is exploding, rendering traditional IT operations management models insufficient. ABC has put significant effort into building monitoring, management, and control systems to raise the standardization and automation levels of operations management.
First, in monitoring management, we have vigorously promoted centralized monitoring of infrastructure and application systems. After years of construction, we have largely achieved 24/7 monitoring of computing, storage, and network infrastructure, and established end-to-end real-time monitoring for critical application systems. When anomalies occur, we can quickly detect, locate, and resolve them.
Second, we developed and rolled out an automated operations management platform, enabling batch automated deployment, compliance checks, and other functions.
Third, we developed and promoted systems for unified user management and behavior auditing, achieving centralized password management, single sign-on, and behavior auditing.
Fourth, based on the ITIL process platform, we implemented standards such as ISO 20000, unifying change, incident, and problem management processes.
Fifth, by collecting logs and network bypass traffic data and leveraging big data analysis and modeling methods, we are building an intelligent operations management platform.
III. Exploration and Outlook
Although ABC has made some progress in IT architecture transformation research and practice, we must also rationally recognize that there are significant differences between banks and internet companies in information system construction — whether in business types, system positioning, regulatory requirements, or technology architecture and cultural mechanisms. Ensuring customer fund security and stable production operation remains the primary principle of bank IT construction. When planning architecture transformation, we must consider factors including technology controllability, risk controllability, and cost controllability in a comprehensive manner, and advance step by step with the principle of self-reliance and steady progress.
1. Core Business Will Continue to Rely Primarily on Centralized Architecture for the Foreseeable Future
The characteristics of banking services largely dictate the choice of core technology platform. Banking services have the following requirements:
First, high reliability. Core banking systems deal with services closely tied to the funds of both the bank and customers, involving huge daily capital flows. These systems are predominantly online transaction processing systems, requiring extremely high reliability.
Second, high availability. Whether the core banking system can provide stable, continuous operation 24/7 year-round not only affects the bank's reputation but also impacts the livelihood of the public and the stability of the financial order. This is a pervasive concern, with high requirements from domestic and international regulatory bodies.
Third, strong consistency. Core banking systems interface with financial markets, demanding real-time transaction responses and strict requirements for the integrity and consistency of accounting data during transaction processing.
2. Further Streamlining Core Systems and Advancing Active-Active Architecture Across Remote Sites
On one hand, as the core system will remain largely centralized, we can adopt read-write separation and an active-active architecture across remote sites to reduce pressure on individual systems and enhance business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. On the other hand, non-core functions will be replaced with distributed architectures, and peripheral systems and applications will be deployed in multi-active architectures across sites. ABC will leverage the "two sites, three centers" project to further drive IT architecture transformation, continue to shrink and streamline the core system, and gradually expand the coverage of multi-site, multi-active architectures.
3. Strengthening Collaboration with Leading IT Companies to Enhance Security and Controllability Through Joint Innovation
In recent years, with China's rapid economic development, especially the rise of major internet companies, the country's information technology products have made considerable progress. By collaborating with leading IT companies, particularly those with strong R&D capabilities, banks can rapidly enhance IT security and controllability, avoiding over-reliance on foreign products and reducing the risk of technological dependence. In recent years, ABC has established joint innovation labs with leading Chinese IT companies such as Huawei and Baidu, deeply integrating new financial technologies like cloud computing, big data, blockchain, and artificial intelligence with ABC's rich application scenarios. This drives IT architecture transformation and improves lean operations.