ICBC launches new data platform to enhance business integration and reduce redundancy

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited (ICBC) has set up a data middle platform operation centre to address the demand for business integration and reduce redundancy in development and data usage.

The new-generation platform can break down data barriers across business lines, achieve agile responses to new requirements and realise rapid go-to-market processes for various data assets. It can aggregate all its operational data stores to integrate data from multiple sources and process activities such as operational reporting and real-time analysis.

At its core, the platform is composed of a data lake, data warehouses, and group information databases. It can achieve enterprise-level data integration and sharing, with three data layer architectures for the source, aggregation and extraction.

The bank claimed that its data system has the largest capacity and the most diverse types of data in the industry. The platform has 50,000 active users and supports more than 100 downstream systems, and over 1,000 business scenarios.

The platform collaborates with ICBC’s artificial intelligence (AI) modelling platform to achieve advanced use of big data in precision marketing, intelligent risk management and decision-making.

It uses machine learning (ML) technology to combine expert rules to realise the security classification of data assets in the middle platform. It implements different management strategies for various levels of data in the entire life cycle to improve data security and protection.

It also uses ML to support data governance and leverage external data points to cross-check and ensure the completeness and accuracy of data assets.

Graph database technology creates a data asset knowledge map, connecting different types of data assets, including source data, indicators, data services and tags, and it clarifies the relationship between data assets.

The bank has received the highest certification for Data Management Capability Maturity Model from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. ICBC is the first in the financial industry and the only bank to obtain this level of certification.

The bank standardised data asset management, operation and service, and has resolved the pain points and blockages such as data silos and other difficulties in capitalising massive data assets.

Since its inception, the platform has helped the bank to acquire 1.4 million retail customers and 900,000 corporate clients. Given the new data added for risk management analysis, it can identify risk exposure that was previously neglected due to limited data sources. This has helped the bank avoid potential losses of over RMB 10 billion ($1.4 billion).

ICBC is exploring various asset value models to quantify the additional economic values of data or data services, to prepare for the future of an exchangeable market for data assets.