Over the past decade, China has undergone a notable transition from a card-based to a digital-first economy, with mobile payments reaching 89 per cent adoption in 2024 – up from virtually zero in 2011. This shift, underpinned by QR code-based transactions and digital wallets such as WeChat Pay and Alipay, has reshaped customer experiences and expanded access to financial services across a population of more than one billion.

These developments have not occurred in isolation. The integration of mobile, cloud, AI, and big data technologies has produced a highly interconnected digital financial ecosystem in China. For global institutions seeking to modernise, the Chinese experience offers a compelling – if not directly replicable – model of how digital infrastructure can scale across retail, corporate, and public sector financial domains. It is within this context that companies like Huawei have developed capabilities that they are now seeking to apply globally.

Huawei, with its deep involvement in China’s digital evolution, has increasingly positioned itself at the intersection of finance and technology transformation. Drawing on experience with major domestic financial institutions, the company is now supporting international financial players in navigating complex transformation challenges – ranging from legacy IT modernisation and data strategy to operational resilience and regulatory compliance.

Building stronger relationships as a priority

Huawei’s approach to the financial sector is grounded in open collaboration and long-term partnerships. The company reports working with more than 11,000 partners and over 5,600 financial institutions across 80 countries. These engagements span a diverse range of projects, including the co-development of core banking platforms, intelligent risk management tools, and digital customer engagement solutions.

A notable example of Huawei’s collaborative approach was demonstrated at Global Financial EcoWeek 2025, where the company brought together over 300 partners from 21 countries to discuss critical issues including AI adoption, data governance, securities innovation, and financial cloud strategy. During the event, several joint ventures were announced.

These included a partnership between Sinosoft and the Thai ICT provider SVOA aimed at advancing smart insurance solutions in Southeast Asia; a collaboration between Latin American firms Netis and Compwire focused on enhancing the operations and maintenance of digital financial infrastructure while setting new standards for smart O&M; and an alliance between Speakly and Indonesian system integrator Intikom, which seeks to apply AI and large language models to improve customer experience and marketing initiatives.

These partnerships illustrate Huawei’s emphasis on regional co-creation and its effort to align technical capabilities with the specific needs of local markets. Rather than pursuing a one-size-fits-all strategy, the company’s model appears to prioritise adaptation and integration with existing ecosystems.

Experience that leads to success

Huawei’s global strategy is informed by its extensive work in China’s domestic market, particularly with digitally native banks and institutions undergoing major structural reform. One of the more prominent examples is WeBank, China’s first fully digital bank, which serves over 400 million retail customers. Huawei’s collaboration with WeBank has focused on enabling high-volume, low-cost digital operations – culminating in an annual per-account operating cost of just $0.30.

Such partnerships underscore the company’s broader strategic emphasis: combining robust infrastructure with agile, data-driven service layers to enable end-to-end digital finance. The insights gained through these initiatives are being translated into a global blueprint for intelligent finance transformation.

A four-pillar blueprint that redefines frameworks

At the core of Huawei’s strategy for intelligent finance lies a four-pillar framework: reshaping financial architecture, reconstructing cloud-native platforms, reengineering data foundations, and reinforcing operational resilience.

The first of these – reshaping architecture – involves transitioning institutions from monolithic legacy systems to distributed, flexible infrastructures. Huawei has invested in distributed, multi-active data centres that improve system uptime and disaster recovery while enabling geographic scalability. These centres support a growing demand for always-on digital services and underpin Huawei’s broader financial infrastructure offering.

Reconstructing cloud-native platforms refers to the enablement of services through modern cloud architectures. These platforms are designed to support superapps and microservices that allow consumers to access a wide range of services – from payments and loans to wealth management – via their smartphones. Huawei's role here is largely infrastructural, offering compatibility with both private and hybrid cloud environments, while integrating with institutions’ internal systems and regulatory requirements.

The third pillar – reengineering data foundations – focuses on the collection, processing, and analysis of vast volumes of real-time financial data. This includes the deployment of real-time data lakehouses and AI-augmented analytics platforms. Huawei’s platforms aim to make such data actionable for use in risk scoring, customer segmentation, product development, and compliance monitoring.

A road to resilience

Resilience remains a top priority for financial institutions globally, especially in light of regulatory developments, geopolitical uncertainty, and heightened cyber risk. Huawei’s fourth pillar – reinventing resilience – addresses this through a range of technological and architectural interventions.

The company employs a V-model resilience framework comprising active-active system recovery, intelligent fault detection, and chaos engineering to simulate failure scenarios and test system robustness. This is complemented by its Resilience Architecture as a Service (R-A-A-S), which is designed to offer institutions a modular approach to integrating resilience into both cloud and on-premise systems.

These technologies are being deployed against a backdrop in which 80 per cent of major banks in the Asia-Pacific region have begun migrating core systems to the cloud. Huawei’s emphasis on hybrid-cloud strategies is intended to ensure that legacy and modern systems can coexist while preserving operational integrity.

Reengineering data foundations with new technologies and AI

The growing volume and velocity of financial data require more sophisticated methods of data management and utilisation. Huawei’s real-time data lakehouse models and AI-integrated analytics platforms are designed to meet these requirements by allowing institutions to harness data for predictive modelling, real-time decision-making, and hyper-personalised services.

Personalisation, in particular, is a key driver of digital transformation in financial services. By analysing user behaviour across digital channels, institutions can deliver targeted products, improve service engagement, and enhance customer retention. Huawei’s platforms provide the infrastructure to support these data-intensive processes, integrating AI capabilities into customer service, marketing, and risk control workflows.

The company has also developed dedicated AI infrastructure tailored to the banking sector. This includes support for predictive analytics, fraud detection, machine learning model training, and operational automation. In parallel, Huawei is investing in energy-efficient systems that combine green computing principles with AI-based energy management, reflecting growing demand for sustainability in digital transformation strategies.

The future is now

As digitalisation continues to reshape the financial landscape, Huawei is positioning itself not simply as a technology vendor but as a strategic participant in the evolving financial ecosystem. By leveraging lessons from China’s rapid digital transformation, the company is refining and exporting scalable frameworks – spanning infrastructure, data, and AI – that aim to support institutions navigating similar transitions in diverse regulatory and market environments.

The success of this strategy will depend on Huawei’s ability to remain adaptable – offering modular, standards-aligned solutions that can evolve with the needs of local markets and regulatory frameworks. Its continued emphasis on collaborative development and technological integration suggests a long-term commitment to reshaping digital finance not in isolation, but as part of a broader network of ecosystem partnerships and cross-sector innovation.

As financial institutions grapple with rising customer expectations, legacy system
constraints, and increasingly complex operational risks, the demand for coherent, future-ready digital strategies is unlikely to abate. Huawei’s initiatives offer one example of how firms may navigate these intersecting challenges – and in doing so, contribute to the future architecture of intelligent finance.

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