How a Chinese Consumer Finance Firm Boosted Efficiency with DevOps – Level‑3 Assessment

Enterprise practices and data show that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success. The DevOps standard and a standard‑based continuous delivery pipeline platform can improve software development efficiency and flexibility, enhancing core competitiveness.

On September 9, 2021, the China Academy of Information and Communications released the 13th batch of DevOps standard continuous delivery assessment results. Henan Zhongyuan Consumer Finance Co., Ltd. (Zhongyuan Consumer Finance) participated with its new‑generation consumer loan system and passed the Level‑3 assessment of the "R&D‑Operations Integrated (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model," becoming the first consumer‑finance company in China to achieve this level.

Interview with Xu Zhifeng, General Manager of the Information Technology Department

Xu introduced Zhongyuan Consumer Finance as a licensed consumer‑finance company founded in December 2016 with a registered capital of CNY 20 billion. The company aims to provide consumer loans and installment services nationwide through technology innovation, channel integration, and big‑data applications.

The project evaluated was the new‑generation consumer loan system launched in October of the previous year, which serves as the core business system.

Benefits of Passing the DevOps Assessment

According to Xu, the assessment and the concrete engineering practices established a DevOps operating system that achieved end‑to‑end continuous delivery, improving overall development efficiency and quality, enabling rapid product validation and delivery, and enhancing the team’s agile development capabilities.

The impact includes more efficient collaboration between development and operations, higher organizational efficiency, reduced production‑environment risk, smaller change scopes during releases, and stronger automated deployment that ensures repeatability and lowers error rates.

Key Performance Metrics

The assessment revealed significant improvements:

Average delivery throughput increased to 6 releases per day.

Mean time to repair critical issues reduced to under 1 hour.

Unit‑test pass rate reached 100 % and automated test coverage also hit 100 %.

Monthly production frequency rose to 18 releases, boosting overall delivery speed and quality.

System Architecture and Features

The new system replaces a monolithic architecture with a micro‑service, distributed design featuring horizontal scaling, master‑slave replication, read‑write separation, multiple data storage methods, and caching. It includes unified service monitoring and alerting via a governance platform, and leverages big data and cloud computing to provide 24/7 uninterrupted customer service.

Challenges Faced During the Assessment

The team encountered several difficulties: maintaining business demand while improving DevOps capabilities, coordinating across multiple functional groups (requirements, development, testing, operations, architecture, PMO, efficiency), a tight eight‑month timeline, an incomplete DevOps toolchain, and external disruptions such as the pandemic and severe weather.

To overcome these, they formed an independent project team, broke down improvement items into tasks, defined clear milestones, held weekly progress meetings, and coordinated resources to ensure steady progress.

Future Plans and Outlook

Xu stated that the assessment helped identify gaps and drive engineering improvements. The company plans to use the results as a benchmark to further promote DevOps practices internally, establish a company‑wide DevOps continuous delivery maturity standard, and continue supporting digital transformation.

Regarding the future of DevOps, Xu believes it will integrate best practices across the software lifecycle, align with business success goals, and become a core competitive advantage for enterprises, especially amid national digital‑transformation initiatives.

For further information on the DevOps standard assessment, contact the China Academy of Information and Communications (Liu Kaili, phone 156 5078 6171, email [email protected]) or the Efficient Operations Community (Dong Hui, phone 185 1511 5139, email [email protected]).