For the longest time, most databases used by banks and financial institutions in China are Western based Sybase, Oracle and IBM DB2. In the context of international tensions and increasingly fierce technological competition, information technology innovation to solve the bottleneck problems of core technologies has become a national issue. With the support of distributed, cloud services, microservices and other innovative technologies, Chinese Financial Technology companies and financial institutions are actively responding to the national call to jump the bandwagon especially in the field of domestic database substitution.
Under the innovation driven wave, domestic database field has thrived with the emergence of a number of domestic database products such as Tencent TDSQL, Huawei GaussDB, ZTE GoldenDB, Wuhan Dameng, Yijingjie, etc., successfully empowering multiple industries with multi-scenario verifications. However, the application of domestic databases in the financial industry especially for banks are extremely rare due to the high-performance requirements for transaction databases, the imperfect ecosystem of domestic databases, the lack of application cases and the risk associated with all the parties who participate in the building of a banking system based on a domestic database.
As a financial technology leader in the core banking system field, Sunline have always actively responded to the call for the independent innovation of information technology, leading to the development of deposit and loan core system, digital core system, credit card core system as well as transaction core system for banks. With the use of a same set of structured distributed technology platform, these systems support cross-platform and cross-database as well as data access layer encapsulation to realize an open and consistent business system database and shielding the different SQL syntax details of different domestic databases, allowing seamless connection of various domestic databases usage.
In recent years, Sunline has joined forces with various domestic database suppliers and customers to build an ecosystem and gradually realize the replacement of domestic databases, realizing China's solid steps in advancing the country’s IT independence strategy.
WeBank takes the lead in adopting domestic database for its digital core
WeBank, China’s first private bank and fully digital bank was established in 2014, with hundreds of millions of QQ users and WeChat users as their target customers. Hence, WeBank’s core system has a requirement to support at least 500 million customer capacity while at the same time having to meet the safety and control requirements as well as the ability to adopt Tencent's self-developed TDSQL database based on an open-source system.
500 million customers were an astronomical figure at that time and the legacy core banking systems based on traditional architecture could never be scaled to meet the design requirements of a distributed system within a short period of time. Moreover, MySQL database were rare in the banking industry the mainstream choice was Oracle database.
In light of WeBank’s requirements, many technology vendors withdrew from the POC within one week. However, the POC team of Sunline successfully completed the docking of MySQL database in only a week’s time with the cross-platform, cross-database and other forward-looking design concepts of Sunline’s independently developed Java based core banking system, doubling the confidence of WeBank to partner with Sunline as the partner for the bank’s core banking system.
The core system implementation tool almost a year and in March 2015, WeBank’s core banking system was launched. Using domestic TDSQL database, the bank’s core realizes horizontal expansion of its processing capacity, supports distributed technology architecture for massive data and completely guarantees the operation of the system from the technical level. With high efficiency and stability, the system become the first domestic distributed core banking system to remove IOE and has become a solid benchmark for domestic database applications in the financial industry.
Hubei Bank introduced the first large-scale domestic general relational database into the core system
With the courage to innovate, Hubei Bank new core uses Sunline’s distributed core banking system to carry a large-scale domestic general relational database, Dameng SQL database. Through the bank's key business scenario support, data service support test and database migration verification, Oracle database and the domestic database were heterogeneously integrated in the core key businesses, verifying the feasibility of replacing the foreign commercial database platform within the core banking system.
In May 2019, the new core of Hubei Bank was successfully put into production. The system uses object-oriented JAVA language to implement all business logic processing to completely and effectively support the system's cross-platform and database independence, realizing horizontal expansion of various relational databases, middleware and hardware platforms to provider standard financial services with consistent channels.
Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank took the lead in adopting a domestic database in the core system of traditional banks
At the beginning of 2018, Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank was facing internal and external factors of information security strategy as well as the need for legacy core replacement, the bank began to explore the feasibility of domestic distributed database solutions and exchanged experience with WeBank. After an organizational inspection, POC testing and the architecture high-availability test, Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank finally decided to adopt Sunline's distributed banking core banking system with Tencent TDSQL database.
At that time, there was no precedent for the domestic replacement of the bank's core banking system database in traditional banks. Therefore, many challenges have been encountered during the implementation of the new core system project for Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank. The most critical one was the compatibility of the domestic distributed database with the core system.
TDSQL distributed database was quite different from traditional centralized database in terms of characteristics. For example, when a centralized database is adopted, the data is concentrated in one node. When implementing certain functions, SQL was more complicated. In order to adapt to the characteristics of the distributed database, Sunline and the bank spent a lot of time in the early stage to adapt the platform and business layer code until the system performance after the transformation is completely comparable to that of Oracle.
On August 18, 2019, Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank’s new core system using domestic databases was put into production and operated efficiently and in a stable manner, fully realizing the replacement of AIX operating system, Sybase database with Linux operating system, TDSQL database and X86 server as well as marking China's first traditional commercial bank core banking system to successfully adopt a distributed domestic database to replace foreign database.
China CITIC Bank takes the lead in adopting domestic databases in the credit card core system
In recent years with the rapid growth of credit card business volume, CITIC Bank Credit Card Business has begun to explore more advanced business systems to build a solution that completely solve the capacity and functional limitation with only one upgrade. After thorough investigation and demonstration, the CITIC Bank Credit Card decided to build the first "domestic server + domestic database + domestic software" for the bank’s credit card core and was the partner of choice in the construction of this important project.
After more than two years of technical research and development, the StarCard core system of CITIC Bank Credit Card Business was successfully put into production on October 26, 2019. The online database uses the ZTE GoldenDB database that adopts a distributed cluster (HBASE+ES+HIVE) solution with PB-level data storage capabilities, real-time query massive data with second-level delay and data penetration capabilities for horizontal correlation in different scenarios to provide data service capabilities of different timeliness and complex scenarios for the card center customer service, marketing support, product service, credit risk, operation support and other lines. The "Double 11" test came soon after the StarCard system was launched. In the early morning of the same day, the online credit card transaction volume exceeded RMB 100 million in only 2 minutes and exceeded RMB 1 billion within one hour. The transaction processing speed has increased by three times with proven stability and advancement in actual data.
Ping An Credit Card Business realizes the successful docking of a new “A+” core and domestic database
Since the launch of Ping An Bank’s retail transformation strategy, the traditional technology system has become increasingly difficult to meet the needs of Ping An’s credit card business in terms of agile innovation and user diversification. In order to achieve a true cost reduction and efficiency increase as well as to build a core with 100% independent intellectual property rights, Ping An Bank Credit Card Business and Sunline officially launched the bank’s new “A+” credit card core project using Tencent's TDSQL database in December 2018, opening the prelude to "decomputerization".
The new "A+" core system maximizes the advanced design and related functions of Sunline’s core system in the credit card authorization center, quota center and card issuing center application design. It uses Tencent's TDSQL database to achieve multiple technical indicators in the credit card system. The deployment of the new “A+” credit card core creates a benchmark for China's credit card core refresh.
Looking back at these breakthrough projects, a group of people who dare to be innovative has open the door to allow the emergence of China's domestic database in the banking field, showing the improvement of domestic databases capabilities day by day to more efficiently meet the needs of banks in multiple business scenarios and be more relevant.
The continuous efforts of Sunline’s ecological builders of localized databases such as Sunline, WeBank, Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank, China CITIC Bank, Ping An Bank, Tencent, etc. to establish a 0 to 1 domestic database replacement for China's banking industry has established many industry benchmarks and provided important practical paths and reference significance for other banks in different scales and different stages of digital transformation to realize the domestic replacement of databases.
Domestic technological innovations are reflected in the field of financial technology, which is to look at the financial credit creation work from the height of the industrial chain and supply chain. In the future, as a firm supporter and practitioner of the national credit and innovation strategy, Sunline will give full play to its advantages in independent, security and controllable core systems to actively promote cooperation with domestic upstream and downstream enterprises to jointly build a domestic financial ecosystem that will promote the information security and controllable process of China's banking industry as well as to export this ability to the overseas markets and allow Chinese financial technology to reach a global influence.
