In July 2022, the first mainframe migration project for a large state-owned bank’s credit card distribute core was successfully put into production despite the severe epidemic situation. This project not only marks another pioneering success with unprecedented influence in the industry and gains positive regulatory attentions because of its originality, but also puts forth higher benchmarking standards and stricter requirements for the industry peers. The superior implementation and delivery by Sunline have landed yet another best practice in the large state-owned banks market, once again displaying strong verification of the company’s leading position in the financial IT field and setting another milestone in innovation-led transformation.
Setting the path to empower the transformation of large banks under the innovation-led trend
In recent years, the wave of digitization and credit innovation has swept across various fields, and the core system of China's bank credit card business has entered a new round of localization and upgrading, with large state-owned banks taking the lead in opening the road to credit card core localization.
While legacy cores are not only expensive, the use of complex business models and redundant account structures limit the improvements of management capabilities and customer experiences that comes with the need of rapid business innovation and neither the bank's credit card business development of "double-100 million" needs. After the system reconstruction, the overall operating cost for the bank’s credit card business has been reduced by 40% with a credit card core system supporting full-featured integration in the country and abroad. The architecture integrates the advantages of cloud-native, unitized and distributed databases, and componentized applications greatly improves transaction processing, data-driven business design, transaction-level sub-account structure, etc., truly realizing customer-oriented services and management requirements, creating China's first benchmark for a secure and controllable large state-owned bank’s credit card core project.
Two years to build the world's leading system with hundreds of millions of customers
The bank's new credit card core project includes four modules: authorization, card issuance, accounting, and quota, among which Sunline is mainly responsible for authorization and card issuance. Sunline’s project team commenced in August 2020, and the technology launch was completed in October 2021. The new core system carries an average daily volume of 400 million transactions with the peak transaction volume supporting more than 30,000 transactions per second. The batch running time at night is less than 2 hours. Compared to the legacy system, the new core has doubled the capacity and recorded leading performances in all aspects in the industry.
The new-generation credit card core system leads in several aspects:
· Domestic distributed cloud platform deployment, covering the Paas components of the technology platform with unitized, distributed, and microservices based architecture to establish various independent and mutually collaborative competence centers fully support the rapid deployment of business and meet the needs of the high concurrent customer transactional demands, greatly enhancing the credit card business operations and product innovation capabilities of the large state-owned bank.
· Runs on the domestic distributed database, OceanBase, which greatly improves the data processing efficiency and storage capacity in line with the requirements of innovation-led transformation which drives security and controllability in the industry.
· Adopting multi-tenant application design through the combination of logical and physical isolation, realizing strong data isolation and effectively controlling the impact radius caused by database abnormalities.
· Deployment architecture adopts the modes of dual locations, three centers and five copies to realize geography redundancy mode with same-city active-active disaster recovery, ensuring high data availability and greatly improving system disaster tolerance.
· Adopt agile delivery model in project management and realize rapid iteration through DevOps pipeline.
Sharing successes by overcoming difficulties and ensuring progress
Sunline’s project team has a peak of nearly 80 people, who jointly practice the values and development concept of sharing successes with customers. Sunline focuses on customer need with continuous innovation and value creation. The bank also provides a platform for Sunline to grow and learn, and both parties collaborated to be the co-builders of a secure and controllable system.
The first batch went through ten rounds of data migration, two sandbox exercises, and five rounds of production follow-ups, but the day of the launch was still full of tension and anxiety. Sunline had worked side by side with all departments of the bank for nearly 30 hours, and successfully completed the first batch of production with steadfast efforts and strong technical capabilities. This production is a phased victory and the beginning of another chapter.
After two months of closure due to outbreak management, the team immediately worked on the second batch of production and launch after a short period of adjustment. Thanks to the previous rounds of drills and refined management, the data migration was carried out in an orderly manner, the platform and applications were running stably and the internal transaction tests were also carried out smoothly, marking successful completion of the second batch of production.
The data volume to go live for the third batch was 30 times that of the second, and 9000 times of the first. From the perspective of data migration and applicability, the exponentially increasing data volume indicates a biggest test. On the basis of the first two rounds, the third batch of production was completed 2 hours earlier than the original opening time, which was extremely rare in the industry.
After the president in charge of the bank announced the success of the production, two years of hard work with more than 30 rounds of drills, more than a dozen active-active switching drills, and multiple rounds of production stress tests have finally paid off. Those tough times also turned into heartwarming moments.
During the two years, the project team ensured the best progress of the project as the primary mission under different difficulties. In order to ensure the smooth progress of project production during Chinese New Year, some had sacrificed going home for the Spring Festival for two years. In order to support the production during the closed period under the severe epidemic, three project teams were urgently arranged to stay in the bank for support and respond to the arrangements of the bank. On behalf of the entire project team, they have fought on the front line to ensure the orderly and smooth development of the production site. The project team's down-to-earth working style and overcoming of all difficulties have been highly recognized in the industry.
The person in charge for Sunline's Credit Card Business said: "There will be times when the bank will replace foreign credit card system that has occupied the large domestic bank market for 20 years. It is a day for Chinese Credit Card Business to be proud, and it is also an impetus for us to move forward and enter the overseas card market. It is the beginning of a glorious time for us".
This project is a major breakthrough in the credit card core innovation for large state-owned banks in China. Sunline has made yet another great achievement in credit innovation. In the process of realizing independence and controllability for more domestic banks, Sunline will continue to lead the development direction of China’s financial industry with professionalism, innovation, hard work and courage.
