How China’s Bank Achieved Industry‑Leading DevOps Maturity: A Deep Dive

Large enterprises worldwide have proven that standardization and tool empowerment are key to success. The DevOps standards and a standards‑based continuous delivery pipeline platform can significantly improve quality, efficiency, and safety, boosting market competitiveness.

On December 26, 2022, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) announced the latest batch of DevOps standard assessment results.

Bank of Communications (BoC) participated with three projects: the New Fund Pension module, the Cloud Inter‑Bank project, and the Huimin Medical Service project. All three passed the CAICT "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" Continuous Delivery Level 3 assessment, indicating BoC’s DevOps capabilities are among the domestic leaders.

Currently, BoC has six projects that passed the DevOps Continuous Delivery standard assessment and one project that passed the DevSecOps standard assessment.

Q&A

Q: Please introduce yourself, your company, and the projects involved in this assessment.

Liu Lei: I am Liu Lei, General Manager of the Software Development Center at Bank of Communications. I appreciate the CAICT evaluation experts for recognizing our DevOps transformation achievements.

Bank of Communications is a century‑old state‑owned commercial bank headquartered in Shanghai. Since 2002, we have undergone data consolidation, the "531" project, and the "New 531" project, achieving significant progress in fintech reform, data governance, architecture transformation, risk control, and stable operations. To enhance digital operating capability, we launched a digital transformation initiative to create new financial models and business value.

The three evaluated projects are:

New Fund Pension module – builds personal pension investment fund functions, interacts with China Securities Depository & Clearing Corporation, handles information exchange, pension account management, and fund settlement, providing comprehensive pension services.

Enterprise Fund Service Cloud system – improves group fund operation efficiency, reduces costs, and mitigates risks by offering financial management services through a direct bank‑enterprise interface.

Huimin Medical Service – a digital credit‑payment product offering medical credit limits, online signing, payment, refund, and repayment services for insured users and hospitals.

Q: Congratulations on passing the DevOps standard assessment. How does this feel?

Liu Lei: We are delighted that the three projects passed the Level 3 Continuous Delivery assessment, confirming our DevOps capabilities are industry‑leading. This validates our DevOps promotion and implementation work and marks a significant achievement in our development‑operations integration process.

This assessment follows the 2021 Smart HR and Cross‑Border Finance projects, which were the first pilot projects to achieve Level 3. The current success further advances our large‑scale DevOps rollout and lays a strong foundation for future tool platform and team improvements.

Q: How did your company decide to join the DevOps standard assessment?

Liu Lei: The DevOps maturity standards, led by CAICT, provide crucial guidance for integrated development, testing, and operations. By benchmarking against industry best practices, we can quickly elevate our DevOps level.

To support digital transformation and deepen fintech integration, higher technology standards are required. DevOps plays a vital role in this transformation, allowing us to combine best practices with BoC’s realities, build an enterprise‑wide DevOps workflow and platform, and achieve end‑to‑end integration and visualization.

We started DevOps and tool platform construction in 2019. In 2021, the Smart HR and Cross‑Border Finance projects became the first pilot projects to pass Level 3. In 2022, we expanded DevOps adoption to improve breadth and depth, selecting remote projects for assessment to drive comprehensive improvement.

Q: What benefits has the DevOps assessment brought to your enterprise and team?

Liu Lei: Passing Level 3 demonstrates that our DevOps capabilities are industry‑leading, accelerating our fintech digital transformation. Organizationally, the assessment helped refine our process体系, enhance tool platform support, and achieve integrated development‑testing‑operations flow, improving automation and unified metric management.

For the development team, the assessment drove standard‑based best practices, end‑to‑end pipeline automation, reduced manual intervention, and boosted delivery efficiency and quality. It also fostered a DevOps culture, unified metric management, and continuous improvement, enabling rapid iteration and better business responsiveness.

Q: Which metrics illustrate the project improvements?

Liu Lei: We refined our metric platform, achieving over 90% automatic build success rate, more than five builds per day, 100% interface test coverage, integration fix time within three hours (fastest 30 minutes), and average pipeline duration under ten minutes.

Q: How were the projects planned and designed?

Liu Lei: We selected two batches of pilot projects. The first batch established the initial DevOps baseline. The second batch focused on remote projects and key new initiatives (e.g., fund pension, Huimin Medical) to broaden DevOps impact and set best‑practice benchmarks.

Q: Was the assessment process smooth? What challenges did you face?

Liu Lei: The process was challenging. Tight schedules and high‑priority requirements forced us to integrate DevOps improvements into regular development cycles, working overtime for four months to achieve quality gains. Additionally, the three projects spanned different locations and technology stacks, requiring rapid platform adaptation and close collaboration.

Q: What is the biggest takeaway from this year’s DevOps implementation, and what are your next steps?

Liu Lei: The three projects’ successful assessment confirms our DevOps maturity. We now have a unified engineering platform supporting over 200 core systems, enabling one‑click build‑deploy pipelines, artifact promotion, and secure, reliable production releases. Future plans include localizing the DevOps standards for BoC, expanding the tool platform, and aligning with the 14th‑15th Five‑Year Plan to build an enterprise‑wide DevOps platform for end‑to‑end visibility, cloud‑native automation, and continuous delivery.

Q: How do you view the future of DevOps?

Liu Lei: DevOps is essential for financial industry digital transformation. It will drive enterprise‑wide full‑process systems and platforms, supporting BizDevOps, MVP, and rapid iteration. We will continue to monitor and adopt emerging DevOps practices to empower high‑quality fintech development.

Contact for DevOps standard assessment:

China Academy of Information and Communications Technology – Liu Kaili (WeChat: liukailing) – Phone: 15650786171 – Email: [email protected]

Efficient Operations Community – Wei Huanxin (WeChat: weihuanxin) – Phone: 18500255645 – Email: [email protected]