As we enter a digital age, banking is changing and the need for digital financial services is rising. But there are always difficulties with change, and the financial services industry is no different.

Over 3,300 financial clients across the world have benefited from Huawei's services, which include building robust infrastructure to speed up application modernization, improve data-driven decision-making, and foster business scenario innovation.

The road toward digital and intelligent transformation described in Brett King's best-selling book Bank 4.0: Banking Everywhere, Never at a Bank—which presents an intriguing vision of the banking industry's future over the next 30 years—must be accelerated.

The CEO of Huawei Digital banking, Jason Cao, used Bank 4.0 as inspiration for his speech at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. He discussed how Huawei can collaborate with partners and consumers to create smarter, greener banking through complete connectivity and intelligence.

"I propose Bank Four Zeros as a means of reinventing resilience," Cao stated to an enthusiastic gathering at the function.

We need to accomplish zero-touch operations, provide zero-trust service and data security, guarantee zero downtime and high availability of financial services, and provide a zero-wait user experience.

"In the digital age, constructing comprehensive resilience requires the implementation of Bank Four Zeros." They are making Non-Stop Banking possible."

Speaking only to FinTech magazine, Cao stated that although all four Zero scenarios are important, Zero Downtime is especially crucial since it forms the basis of the company.

"I believe the capability of this redundancy has not matched customer demand and expectation in recent years because banking has developed so fast to satisfy customer requirements," Cao stated.

That explains their issues. All banks, large or little, in rich or developing nations, are dealing with this issue, and having zero downtime at the moment is a major concern for all of them.

How the zero-downtime GaussDB database is possible

The next-generation distributed database from Huawei, called GaussDB, is a perfect option for the finance sector looking to achieve zero downtime.

The product of Huawei's more than 20 years of research and development, it has already demonstrated its exceptional performance over the last ten years in China's major banks.

Considering that the database has been in existence for two decades, why is GaussDB just now being advertised to international audiences?

Cao clarifies that before to being extensively utilized by Chinese banks, it was created and tested internally by Huawei across several divisions. GaussDB's performance has improved and it has grown more mature over time.

He asserts that "what happened in China can provide other countries a very good model." "Chinese developments are evident; the country is now at the forefront. GaussDB made it possible to move to a new design as a result of the dramatic increase in transaction counts over the past ten years, which increased demands on the current architecture.

"We believe this new architecture can help banks in those countries because we are seeing this in other countries as well."

Cao discusses King's Bank 4.0 book, how he and the well-known author discussed its principles, and how this has affected Huawei's approach to digital money and the idea of banking everywhere.

According to Cao, banking is becoming more widespread, but it won't happen immediately.

It is becoming a reality in China. The bank is shifting to an engagement-based model from a transaction-based model. According to Cao, "this brings significant changes to the applications, the infrastructure, and the technologies as well as the business model."

From a technological perspective, "Banking Everywhere" means that we must ensure that no transaction ever poses a danger or causes an issue. It's not simple. For instance, how would you implement 5G to allow transactions on the London Tube system? "It's easy to say, but hard to do, banking everywhere."

GaussDB's quick migration and excellent availability are highlighted by Cao. He claims that following the implementation of GaussDB in one of China's largest banks, the recovery time objective (RTO) was reduced to 120 seconds, setting a new global record. He claims that Huawei is attempting to cut this down to only 30 seconds.

GaussDB facilitates migration while also making it simpler. The application development burden during the Oracle to GaussDB transfer may be 90% reduced using a one-stop migration solution.

Another essential element for attaining high availability is storage, and Huawei storage is expanding quickly, becoming among the top two global storage suppliers by 2023.

Cao gives instances of top banks using Huawei technology to provide the Four Zeros, ranging from Saudi Arabia to Singapore and Turkey to Thailand.

The banking industry has seen significant transformation in the past five years. What is Cao's prediction for the next five years?

Many banks still find it difficult to operate using a traditional paradigm, despite claims that we are living in the AI, intelligent, or open banking eras. Thus, it's almost like a multigenerational industry now," he claims.

On the one hand, we need to get ready for exciting new developments like Gen AI. To understand the difficulties we confront today, we must be realistic. It is quite difficult for a bank to adopt Gen AI or any other intelligent opportunity if it is not robust enough.

"Whether you're a large bank or a small bank, it's critical to reshape resilience as a digital world approaches and a world of uncertainty confronts us," adds Cao.

In order to face this challenge, develop Four Zeros through technology, redefine our resilience, and ultimately achieve non-stop banking, we aim to collaborate with our clients.

"After five years of struggle, we have learned how to build resilience, and we are confident that we can work with our customers to create a more resilient world."