How China’s Leading Banks Master DevOps: Insights from the CAICT Maturity Model

Amid digital transformation, enterprises adopt DevOps to boost IT efficiency; the "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) provides high‑value guidance. Leading state‑owned commercial banks participated in CAICT‑organized DevOps maturity assessments, improving IT capabilities, integrating team resources and talent, and better supporting business systems.

Participating Banks and Assessment Counts

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), Bank of China, Jiankang Financial Technology, Bank of Communications (including its Credit Card Center), and Postal Savings Bank of China together contributed 19 assessment projects.

ICBC – eLife & Intelligent Investment Advisory System

eLife: A comprehensive consumption‑finance platform for ICBC’s card center, serving tens of millions of users with daily active users around 500,000. Large‑scale DevOps rollout involved strong leadership support, a dedicated continuous delivery platform team, toolchain service‑oriented packaging, and cultural promotion to increase tool adoption and stability.

Intelligent Investment Advisory: An AI‑driven advisory service built on big data and AI, deployed on a fully cloud‑native architecture using ICBC’s self‑developed IaaS and PaaS clouds. The system achieves high availability, elastic scaling, fine‑grained logging, automated cloud operations, secure isolation, and end‑to‑end DevOps. It follows a front‑back separation with distributed service, log, monitoring, batch, and file centers, delivering sub‑0.2 s average response time.

Agricultural Bank of China – Five Projects + One Follow‑up

The bank evaluated five projects covering loan middle‑office, personal online banking, distributed application interconnect platform (AIR), VAT input tax management, and financial mini‑store, spanning Java and C# stacks, cloud and on‑premise, micro‑service and mobile architectures. Through tool, process, and standard improvements, they achieved closed‑loop management across requirement, development, testing, deployment, and operation.

Challenges included cross‑department coordination, toolchain localization, metric system construction, institutional breakthroughs, standard understanding, and pandemic‑induced remote work.

The mobile banking deposit‑loan module featured massive user volume (hundreds of millions) and high daily transaction volume (over 40 million), built on Vue front‑end and the bank’s proprietary Taihang back‑end framework, employing offline package mechanisms, hot‑fixes, and automated deployment.

Bank of Communications – Two Projects (Head Office) + One Credit Card Center Project

The Credit Card Center’s next‑generation internet platform, built on the self‑developed micro‑service framework “Touda,” offers full‑channel, full‑financial, and full‑life services with high availability, concurrency, low latency, and strong extensibility, enhanced by a full‑process DevOps toolchain.

Head Office projects include a cross‑border finance system and a smart HR system leveraging AI and big data for digital personnel management.

Assessment results: build success rate >90 %, daily builds >5, interface test coverage 100 %, integration fix time <1 h, pipeline duration 5‑10 min, each release saving 2 person‑days.

Postal Savings Bank of China – Three Projects

Projects: Postal Savings Business System, Operations Center System, and Operational Risk Management System, covering front‑end customer interaction, back‑end operations, and risk management. Architectures range from traditional clusters to distributed micro‑services, with development models spanning waterfall to agile.

Key metrics: automatic build success >90 %, deployment success >90 %, unit test coverage >65 %, automated test pass rate >98 %, pipeline fix time <30 min.

Security & Risk Management (Standard 6) Overview

ICBC’s mobile banking project adopted the CAICT DevSecOps standard, establishing a systematic, end‑to‑end security development framework covering organization responsibilities, personnel capabilities, tool maintenance, third‑party software, data management, and infrastructure. Security measures include lightweight threat modeling, open‑source component analysis, and embedded security requirements.

System & Tool (Standard 8) Overview

Bank of China’s DevOps Cloud Platform supports enterprise‑level continuous integration and deployment across diverse technology stacks, improving build success by 11 % and deployment success by 22 %, reducing build time from 6 min to 3 min, and cutting pipeline execution time by 40 %.

Jianxin Financial Technology’s “Yaoguang” Agile Development Platform provides collaborative R&D, DevOps toolchain, asset management, low‑code development, and metric capabilities, enhancing pipeline robustness, standardization, and visual debugging.

All data are sourced from public news releases and the DevOps assessment website, with statistics up to 24 December 2021.