Infosys and Huawei launch cloud-based universal banking capability

In a bid to further expand its offering to the global universal banking industry, Infosys Finacle and Huawei have become partners. Through the partnership, the Finacle Universal Banking Solution Suite will be run on Huawei’s FusionCloud – creating a private cloud-based system for banks, reducing a range of costs related to infrastructure and adding flexible scaling capabilities.

Changing regulatory structures are allowing startup banks to create new propositions for customers in the UK, challenging the dominance of larger banking institutions. These challengers tend to leverage off the shelf backend banking solutions to more easily meet stringent compliance requirements. A new breed of such solutions is coming online, including Capgemini- and Temenos Group’s Banking Platform solution. 

Infosys Finacle* provides a suite of universal banking solutions that are used by more than 848 million bank customers across 94 countries – accounting for around 16% of all the world’s adult banked population. The universal banking product provides a broad range of capabilities, including core banking, online banking, mobile banking, customer relationship management (CRM), payments, treasury, origination, liquidity management, islamic banking (a growing market globally), wealth management, and analytics.

The partnership between Infosys Finacle and Huawei will see the Finacle Universal Banking Solution Suite be run on Huawei’s FusionCloud based cloud platform. Through the partnership, the two firms hope to be able to leverage the lower infrastructure cost and application management costs of cloud based services, while delivering “high resilience and enhanced customer service efficiency across channels.” The platform uses a private cloud network, through which benefits, such as lower cost of ownership and maintenance can be achieved.

As part of the internal due diligence of the new solution, EY was called in to observe and review the benchmarking process of the new application – which, according to the results from an Infosys spokesperson, achieved around 3.8 million transactions in a total test duration of two and a half hours. The service is designed to be flexible, based on elastic demand or the need to rapidly scale services.

Additionally, the service provides a “360 degree” view of customers, through an integrated analytics package, “helping banks drive right-sell opportunities and create personalised services for customers. This along with a unified and frictionless omnichannel experience will markedly improve user satisfaction.”

Qian Yuan (Diana), President of Marketing and Solution Sales Department at Huawei Enterprise Business Group, says, “This new offering from Huawei and Finacle will empower financial institutions with a world class banking software, with competitive capex, reduced opex and superior flexibility in operations. With reduced total cost of ownership and increased return on investment, banks will benefit from substantial savings which can be channelled to accelerate innovation and strengthen profitability.”

Andy Dey, President, Customer and Operations, at EdgeVerve, adds, “The increasing digitally native customer base of financial institutions is resulting in rapid increase in transactions loads, pushing the need for flexibility in designing and managing IT deployment strategies. This joint offering from Finacle and Huawei is a perfect fit, bringing to market an industry leading, digital age banking solution suite along with the security, flexibility and scalability of a private cloud.”

* Infosys Finacle is a universal banking solution part of EdgeVerve Systems, which is itself a wholly owned product subsidiary of IT giant Infosys.