After five years of grinding a sword, Weizhong Bank's financial technology is fully open source, and the blockchain plays an important role.

There is such a bank, less than five years since its establishment, the number of patents ranked fifth in the global banking industry, and the proportion of IT investment in revenues is significantly ahead of the industry, and IT personnel account for more than the total number of employees.

At the same time, it also swept a series of “first”: the first private bank in China, the first private bank with assets exceeding 200 billion yuan, the first private bank with AAA rating, and the first private bank with high attention to blockchain. .

It is the micro bank.

On July 26th, a number of “first” all-in-one micro-banks then drank “Tou Yu Tang”: announced the four major sections of “ABCD” for financial technology ( A I-artificial intelligence; B lockchain-blockchain; C loud Computing – Cloud Computing; Big D ata – Big Data) Full open source.

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Specifically, in terms of artificial intelligence , the open source distributed storage engine EGGROLL and the feder learning open source project FATE (Federated AI Technology Enabler), the latter is a secure computing framework based on data privacy protection, by international artificial intelligence experts, micro Yang Qiang, the chief artificial intelligence officer of the Bank of China, led the team to develop independently and contributed to the Linux Foundation in June this year;

In the blockchain, the Joint Gold Chain Alliance open source working group created the financial-level blockchain underlying open source platform FISCO BCOS, open source self-developed entity identity and trusted data exchange solution WeIdentity, distributed event-driven architecture WeEvent, block Chain intermediate platform WeBASE;

In terms of cloud computing , open source configuration management service system WeCMDB, distributed architecture management framework WeCube;

In terms of big data , we open sourced the financial-level big data platform WeDataSphere, as well as the exploration analysis tool Scriptis and the big data middleware Linkis.

Since then, Weizhong Bank has become the first bank in China to fully embrace open source.

Ma Zhitao, deputy governor and chief information officer of Weizhong Bank, said, “Open source is a very important means of open innovation. When Weishang Bank was founded, it used a lot of open source technology to build our technology platform. We firmly believe in investing in open source, embracing open source and contributing open source. It is a very important part of supporting our future open innovation strategy ."

The prototype of distributed business is beginning to show up, creating a "3O" open strategy

As a private bank with a technology-based bank, Weizhong Bank has always been a leader in technology exploration.

Five years ago, in response to the massive and high-concurrency Internet ecosystem, Weizhong Bank decided to use cloud computing to build a distributed architecture banking core system that fully adopts security and control technology. We must know that even if it is put into the present, there is rarely a financial institution that dares to completely structure the infrastructure on a distributed architecture. These measures are not extremely powerful.

Nowadays, this system is supporting the business of Weizhong Bank 7*24 hours, safely and reliably, and the operation and maintenance cost is much lower than that of the traditional banking structure, helping the micro-bank to become the 17 private banks in the country. The first private bank broke 200 billion yuan.

The effect of distributed technology is thus evident.

At the same time, the maturity of distributed technology has also promoted the development of a distributed business model with “multi-participation, shared resources, and transparent mode”. In the travel, short-term and take-away scenarios, the emergence of a distributed business model such as Uber, Airbnb, and Meituan Review – sharing business, has greatly improved social efficiency.

In Ma Zhitao's view, the shared business operation model still relies on “centralized platform operators”, and the relationship between distributed business partners in the ultimate model will be more equal and fairer.

Based on the distributed business model, it will dominate the prediction of the future business form. As a technology bank, Weizhong Bank is soberly aware that the banking ecosystem will undergo significant changes : from the past bank-centric to user-oriented The center shifts from a closed ecosystem that is product- and process-oriented to an open ecosystem that is built by infrastructure providers.

Therefore, Weizhong Bank fully embraces open innovation and proposes a future-oriented “3O” open banking strategy : Open Platform, Open Innovation, and Open Collaboration.

Open platform: Provide services externally through API, SDK and H5 to support its own business innovation.

Open innovation: Reduce cooperation thresholds based on open source software, intellectual property licensing, and reference implementation (RI).

Open Collaboration: Based on distributed technology, form an open business alliance to achieve cross-institutional collaborative innovation.

Open source with open source and release 9 open source projects in half a year

In Ma Zhitao's view, open source is undoubtedly a very important means of achieving open innovation.

Take GitHub's ranking of the number of employees participating in open source projects as an example. It can be seen that foreign technology companies such as Microsoft and Google are very active.

"The number one Microsoft's past development model is relatively closed. By embracing the open source strategy, the business in recent years has achieved rapid development. Once the road to open source is achieved, the results are very obvious ." Ma Zhitao said.

Although Weizhong Bank is a financial institution, it attaches great importance to the construction of scientific and technological capabilities. In this regard, Ma Zhitao explained: Because banks used to be in a very strong position in the past, many banks did not regard technology as a core productivity, and many businesses chose to outsource. In the future ecosystem, it is more and more integrated across the industry. The technology of science and technology has become very important. If banks do not change, they will face enormous challenges. Only by truly taking the scientific research ability in its own hands and ensuring innovation, banks can still occupy a more positive position in the new era and new ecological environment.

If we want to quantify the importance of technology, Weizhong Bank is clearly emboldened:

In terms of the proportion of IT investment in revenue, the value of Weizhong Bank in 2018 is 14.8%, and the value of the global banking and financial services industry is 7.3%.

In terms of IT personnel, at the end of 2018, Weizhong Bank's IT staff accounted for 54%, and domestic listed banks were 1%-8%.

In terms of the number of patents, Weifang Bank ranked fifth in the global banking invention patent list in 2018. The top four were Bank of America (founded in 1784), Bank of China (founded in 1912), and Construction Bank (established in 1954) and JP Morgan Chase (founded in 1799). It can be seen that the short-term establishment of the above four banks is also 65 years, and the micro-bank is less than five years old.

In terms of open source, Weizhong Bank actively participated in the open source community since its inception and actively contributed. In 2017, Weizhong Bank and other members of the Golden Chain Alliance Open Source Working Group jointly launched FISCO BCOS, the underlying open source platform for financial-grade blockchain, to provide a reliable infrastructure for blockchain applications.

In 2018, Weizhong Bank focused on the application of blockchain and ecological construction, and launched WeIdentity, an entity identity and trusted data exchange solution, which was officially open sourced in 2019.

In 2019, Weizhong Bank was in a state of flux. After the previous technology accumulation, it released 9 open source projects (2 in the field of artificial intelligence, 3 in the blockchain field, 2 in the cloud computing field, and 2 in the big data field). This scene is exactly as Ma Zhitao said. "In the years before the growth of bamboo, its growth rate was not very fast, and it may be very slow. Once it broke ground, it will grow very fast."

Five years of grinding a sword, the current test edge.

Blockchain into "connectors" in various fields, open source map debut

Zhang Kaixiang, chief architect of Weizhong Bank Blockchain, described the blockchain as a “connector”. The sharing, collaboration, incentive, and traceability features provided by it can connect artificial intelligence, big data, Internet of Things and other technologies. Looking at the number of open source projects, the blockchain is also the largest number of open source projects in Weizhong Bank, from the underlying platform, middleware to the upper application suite.

FISCO BCOS is a low-level open source platform for financial-grade blockchain. Its single-chain TPS performance is 10,000+. It supports rapid formation of alliances and chain-building, high availability, high security, high reliability, and privacy protection.

WeIdentity and WeEvent are two blockchain application suites. The former is a set of entity identity and trusted data exchange solutions, providing a set of basic layer and application interfaces such as distributed entity identity and management, and trusted data exchange protocols. , can realize the secure authorization and exchange of data of entity objects (human or object). The latter is a distributed event-driven architecture that implements a credible, reliable, and efficient cross-institutional, cross-platform event notification mechanism.

WeBASE is a middleware platform built between blockchain applications and FISCO BCOS nodes. Developers can deploy WeBASE's interactive modules such as browsers, management consoles and other tools on top of blockchain nodes. They can also be built into WeBASE based on WeBASE. The components and APIs for the development of the application.

For the above layered logic, Fan Ruibin, deputy general manager of Distributed Commercial Technology Development Department of Weizhong Bank and head of Weizhong Bank Blockchain explained : We started the blockchain bottom platform and continued to cooperate with partners in the back. It is not enough to find this in the process. Therefore, on the basis of this underlying platform technology, we have introduced WeBASE, a middleware that reduces R&D costs and improves R&D efficiency. But there is still a long way to go from the business, and there are some common solutions or solutions for business scenarios. Through the construction of the bottom layer of the blockchain, the middleware layer and the application suite layer, we hope to build a very good foundation for users, developers and users, and to do some application and development work conveniently.

In terms of applications, there are currently hundreds of applications based on FISCO BCOS, and dozens of them are put into production. The application scenarios include copyright, justice, finance, government affairs, and the Internet of Things. This also highlights the great charm of open source. "Once the source code is released, developers can use the market's creativity to make a lot of innovative applications based on this open source underlying platform," Ma Zhitao said.

WeIdentity has been used in the “People's Copyright” platform jointly developed by the electronic certificate of Macao's smart city construction, People's Online and Weizhong Bank. WeEvent is used by the Changhong smart home for the Internet of Things.

Through the technical no-man's land, the developer community continues to grow

This is the first time that Weizhong Bank has fully demonstrated the four core competencies of ABCD since its establishment. The blockchain forum on the day was packed, and the open space behind it was crowded.

Some of these people are experts from the open source community, some are developers who are not active in the community, some have already met, and more are netizens meeting for the first time.

This enthusiasm made Zhang Kaixiang, the helm of Weizhong Bank's blockchain technology, excited and thanked the audience.

More than three years ago, the development of the blockchain was in full swing, and the blockchain was first listed on the cover of The Economist as a “machine of trust”. Foreign technology companies and financial institutions have entered the blockchain. In September 2015, the R3 Alliance, initiated by Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, etc., launched a product called Corda. . In December 2015, the IBM-led Linux Foundation launched the HyperLedger Fabric project. The blockchain has also become the most financed sector in US venture capital in 2015.

The whirlwind of the blockchain quickly reached the domestic market. Under policy blessing, giant layout and capital chasing, 2016 quickly became the first year of China's blockchain.

The Golden Chain Alliance, initiated by more than 20 financial institutions and technology companies including the Shenzhen Financial Technology Association, was also established in 2016.

Although in 2016, Weizhong Bank released a blockchain-based inter-agency joint reconciliation platform and put it into the production environment, there are still a large number of “no-man's land” for blockchain technology to be explored.

According to Zhang Kaixiang, since there is nothing to refer to, the blockchain technology system is done from the beginning, and the consensus algorithm has been written for more than a year. In order to respond to the needs of the community in a timely manner, Weizhong Bank also established a technical exchange group. In the early days, Zhang Kaixiang has always been the number one "customer service" inside, even if it is late at night, it will promptly answer the questions that are thrown out in the group.

After experiencing countless nights and nights, the problem of blockchain technology has gradually been overcome.

When the test team said that the blockchain performance reached 10,000 TPS, Zhang Kaixiang sent the team the biggest red envelope in the WeChat group.

Nowadays, blockchain technology is no longer a no-man's land. The development team of Weizhong Bank no longer has to be alone, because thousands of developers have joined the open source community, and they jointly maintain more than 50 code repositories. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code and 200,000 words of developer documentation have made the entire ecosystem prosper.

Believe in the power of belief, to meet the application explosion

Looking back, Zhang Kaixiang used 16 words to conclude: because of love, so believe; because I believe, so see .

"Because we love technology and love the prospects of distributed business, we believe that we will eventually arrive in the distance; we believe that we can see the entire blockchain and the entire distributed business will come in the near future, so we are willing to continue to invest."

There is no longer a technical problem, Zhang Kaixiang believes that the most missing part of the current blockchain is talent :

This talent is not only a talent for writing code, but also has a blockchain thinking and a distributed business thinking. In a complex game environment, in a multi-party collaboration, it can find a sustainable and developable application model. Business model talent.

Talents are the key to promoting application. For this reason, Weizhong Bank is establishing academic alliances with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, CCF, training institutions, universities, etc., cultivating industry and academic talents, and jointly exploring the application model.

“Where the blockchain is needed, where our developers are.”

The developers of Weizhong Bank not only have the WeChat group and the public number on the Internet, but also go to Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiaotong University and other universities, international high-end exhibitions, hackathon, various lectures, etc., to listen to feedback from students and users. , continuous iterative system.

However, from the perspective of the entire industry, the current blockchain is still not as fast as expected.

In this regard, Fan Ruibin told Babbitt that the emerging industries must experience the process of trial and error in the early days. The blockchain industry is undergoing significant improvements, from early applications in the financial sector to today's judicial deposits, copyright protection, data traceability, agricultural farming, etc. “It used to be a frozen soil, and now you will find that in some parts In the area, the frozen soil has melted, and green buds grow out, and some open a little flower ."

Give time, give patience, believe in the power of belief, and the era of massive blockchain outbreaks will come.

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