Juneng Hechuang and iSoftStone Financial Technology Made Breakthroughs in New Ecology of Digital Finance

Standards of excellence are constantly changing. 

Twenty years ago, the technological service provider in the financial sector was called IT solution provider that took overseas package software deployment as an honor as it represented the highest level of the industry. Fifteen years ago, a financial IT solution provider took product duplication and scale promotion as an honor as it represented the highest level of capability. 

Thereafter, the IT solution provider in the financial sector was called financial technological service provider that took providing end-to-end solutions ranging from core to peripheral and from trade to analysis as an honor. They were expected to have a higher comprehensive capability and drive financial service innovations through digital technologies on the basis of application scenes. 

Today, the capabilities are inherited but the standards of excellence keep changing. The new-generation financial technological service providers have started to pool ecological capabilities and provide customized point-blank services. That is exactly what iSoftStone Financial Technology, a financial technological service subsidiary of iSoftStone, is doing now. 

More comprehensive financial science and technology 

In nature, financial science and technology includes the use of cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, IoT, block chain and other digital technologies to enable the restructuring and upgrading of the financial industry. It is a correct but simple concept, not thorough enough. 

According to the "fourteenth five-year plan", it is necessary to "facilitate the development of digital economy and improve the level of financial science and technology", which well depicts the image of digital finance and clarifies the development path thereof. Comprehensive digital financial innovation is a concept beyond boundaries. 

Things have developed as above. 

Hot technologies are easily found in the financial science and technology sector, e.g., the federal safety computing relating to information safety; privacy protection relating to privacy; block chain relating to digital currency; cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, 5G and other digital technologies deeply integrated with financial digitalization. 

But hot technologies can't be directly converted into productivity. It needs to be integrated with different industries. Only "extensive finance" that breaks the industrial boundaries can realize the comprehensive benefits of digital finance. For instance, the "Yinbaotong" as introduced in the past; "Mingonghui" as designed to ensure payment of salaries to migrant workers; and the supply chain and scene financial services offered by financial institutions. 

The foregoing financial services featuring deep integration of financial technology and substantive economy are part of "extensive finance". The reason why "extensive finance" can become a hot industrial spot is possibly depicted by the opening chapter of Fortress Besieged written by Qian Zhongshu, "those in the city want to go out and those outside the city want to come in". Financial institutions are looking for breakthroughs and expect to break the boundaries of conventional deposit and lending services. In the era of digital economy, they try to find new values in a brand-new ecology and create values through interconnection. 

Create financial values with clients 

It means that the financial technological service providers of financial institutions need to satisfy higher requirements and equip themselves in an all-around way. For this purpose, iSoftStone Financial Technology has started to diversify its business portfolio: other than capital flows, more comprehensive financial services require the exchange of business flow, data flow and information flow with all walks of life. It thus depends on iSoftStone Financial Technology's technical ability, ecological linking and ecological operating capabilities. More comprehensive financial services further require customized and individualized products, particularly the ability to continuously support frontier branches. The localized service ability of iSoftStone Financial Technology thus becomes essential. 

Actually, "extensive finance" includes industrial finance, inclusive finance, innovation finance and multiple other factors. Huawei Cloud, Ali Cloud and others are all expanding the industrial Internet and financial institutions are expanding industrial finance as well. Despite immature technical conditions before, the technical combo of "5G+IoT+AI+machine vision" addresses the problems of asymmetric information and unpunctual feedback in movable property financing; trustworthy intelligent computing service (TCIS) is also relocating the credit card from purse to cell phone. 

A series of technical breakthroughs have laid a solid base for the "extensive finance" of financial institutions and these institutions are trying to generate traffic separately. Live broadcast and short video have become new marketing channels of banks online; in the brick-and-mortar world, financial institutions are developing new portals of traffic other than outlet, the Internet and mobile banking. 

For instance, financial institutions are cooperating with smart parks, smart business circles and industrial bases to obtain the real service data of enterprises via a uniform information system. It thus enables a financial institution to provide credit, clearing and traffic attraction services for enterprises on such basis and enhances innovation in the services of supply chain finance and other "extensive finance".

iSoftStone Financial Technology aims to empower such innovations in "extensive finance": it can provide all-around technical capabilities ranging from core to peripheral and from trade to analysis. With the technical capabilities if iSoftStone, it can drive service innovation through technical innovation and establish its core capability in knowledge map, user portrait and human-machine interaction, which are extensively applied in such financial scenes as intelligent customer service, certificate and card identification, risk control and assistant decision-making. 

Moreover, iSoftStone Financial Technology adopts the mode of co-creation with customers to increase the financial technological capability of a financial institution considering the realistic problems encountered during the development of digital finance and the restrictions of technical services. 

"Interfacing between industry and finance relates to application system configuration and also the interfacing of operating data between a financial institution and the industrial client. The technological service provider thus needs to provide auxiliary operating services", said Zhongliang Che, senior vice president of iSoftStone, "iSoftStone Financial Technology stands by financial institutions and offers then localized technical services and financial ecology construction and promotional services". 

Link up two ecologies with point-blank services

This is the diversified roles that iSoftStone undertakes. 

It undertakes the "polymerization" strategy of iSoftStone in the financial sector: focus on banks, insurance companies, securities brokerages, financial asset management companies and other financial clients and pool together the technical, service and brand resources of iSoftStone to offer financial technical services. 

To Zhongliang Che, iSoftStone Financial Technology is becoming a new-generation financial technical service provider. "We can combine our digital technology and our service ability, merge our financial technology with the digital transformation of all walks of life, turn ourselves into the junction point of 'industrial ecology' and 'financial ecology' and avail our advantageous resources and capabilities for bidirectional enabling services". 

In the ecology of digital finance, iSoftStone links up the financial institution and the ICT enterprise. On the one hand, it serves the financial institutions to make commercial innovations and accelerates the development and promotion of the ecology of "extensive finance". On the other hand, it also serves the ICT enterprises to have in-depth cooperation with financial institutions. 

Such point-blank services that match the strategies of different financial institutions and the positioning of different industrial clusters have been put to practice. Along the 80km-long "Zheng-Xu Economic Corridor", there is a high concentration of equipment making, intelligent terminal, nonferrous metal and food industries. However, the parallel financial ecology and financial data haven't yet been fully mined and utilized. They haven't been extensively applied for customer care, product design and commercial development. 

"iSoftStone can rely on its localized service team to provide data analyzing and mining services, draw the user portrait and customize high-end customer care and lost customer care services", said Che Zhongliang. 

Obviously, the foregoing ability of iSoftStone Financial Technology is well beyond the service range of a conventional financial service provider and this is the value of point-blank services and the value of new-generation financial technological service provider. As Zhongliang Che comments, "iSoftStone avails flexible human resources to match the technological strategies of clients at different phases and offers professional point-blank services in line with the strategies of clients in different regions".