How China’s Top Banks Accelerate Digital Transformation with DevOps Maturity

In the context of digital transformation, enterprises are adopting DevOps to improve IT efficiency. The "R&D‑Operations Integrated (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series standards led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) provide strong guidance, and many leading industry enterprises have improved IT capabilities, integrated team resources and talent, and better supported business systems through participation in CAICT‑organized DevOps maturity assessments.

Participating State‑Owned Banks and Evaluation Count

Six state‑owned commercial banks and their subsidiaries—Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Postal Savings Bank of China, and their fintech subsidiaries—completed 43 assessment items.

Assessment Overview by Bank

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC): e‑Life & Intelligent Investment Advisory System

e‑Life: A comprehensive consumption‑finance platform for ICBC’s card center serving tens of millions of users with ~500,000 daily active users. Large‑scale DevOps rollout involved strong top‑level promotion, a dedicated continuous‑delivery platform team, tool‑chain service‑oriented packaging, and cultural propagation to gain DevOps recognition.

Intelligent Investment Advisory System: An AI‑driven investment advisory service built on big data and AI, deployed on a fully cloud‑native architecture using ICBC’s private IaaS and PaaS clouds. The system achieves high availability, elastic scaling, fine‑grained logging, automated cloud operations, and end‑to‑end DevOps, delivering sub‑0.2 s response times.

The project uses a one‑stop development collaboration platform and integrated DevOps toolchain to provide traceable, automated processes from requirement intake to release.

Agricultural Bank of China

Participated with 12 projects, achieving 5 projects in a single round. Projects covered Java and C# stacks, cloud/on‑premise, middle‑office, front‑office, mobile, and micro‑service architectures, spanning invoicing, mobile marketing, credit, personal online banking, and distributed interconnect platforms. The bank built a tool‑chain, tackled cross‑department coordination, tool localization, metric system construction, institutional policy breakthroughs, standard understanding, and pandemic‑related remote work challenges.

Mobile Banking Deposit & Loan Module: Serves over 100 million users with daily transaction volume >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 (BoCom)

Credit Card Center – New Generation Internet Platform: A comprehensive internet platform based on the proprietary micro‑service framework “Touda”, offering high availability, high concurrency, low latency, and strong extensibility, enhanced by a full‑process DevOps toolchain.

Head Office – Cross‑Border Finance & Smart HR Projects: Systems for cross‑border financial services and AI‑driven HR management, achieving high build success rates (>90%), frequent builds, 100% test coverage, and rapid pipeline execution.

Postal Savings Bank of China

Participated with three projects—Operating Risk Management System, Business Operation Center System, and Postal Savings Business System—covering front‑end, back‑end, and risk domains, employing both traditional cluster and micro‑service architectures, and achieving high automation metrics (build success >90%, deployment success >90%, unit test coverage >65%).

China Agricultural Bank FinTech (Nongyin Jinke)

Implemented the Smart Fruit Industry Platform (SFIP) to digitize fruit cooperative management, online sales, and financial services, supporting rural revitalization.

China Bank (BOC) – DevOps Cloud Platform

The enterprise‑level DevOps cloud platform supports end‑to‑end agile delivery, improving build success by 11%, deployment success by 22%, and reducing average build time from 6 minutes to 3 minutes, while enhancing quality metrics.

Construction Bank FinTech (Jianxin Jinke) – YaoGuang Agile Development Platform

The YaoGuang platform provides full‑process R&D capabilities, including collaborative development, DevOps toolchain, asset management, low‑code development, and metric tracking, serving 38 branches and all business units.

Nongyin Jinke – Efficiency Management System (EMS)

The EMS platform offers end‑to‑end R&D and operations capabilities for over 500 users, including code, requirement, CI/CD pipeline, and version management, reducing communication costs.

Application Design (Standard 5) Status

Details of application design assessments were provided for each bank, highlighting compliance with design standards.

Security & Risk Management (Standard 6) Status

ICBC Mobile Banking integrated DevSecOps standards, covering organization responsibilities, personnel capabilities, tool maintenance, third‑party software, data management, and infrastructure, achieving end‑to‑end security development.

System & Tool (Standard 8) Status

BOC’s DevOps cloud platform integrates CI/CD, testing, delivery, quality management, security control, and artifact management, improving build and deployment success rates and reducing pipeline execution time by 40%.

Efficiency Measurement Status

YaoGuang platform and EMS provide comprehensive metric collection and visualization, supporting continuous improvement.

Contact Information for DevOps Standard Assessment

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

China Academy of Information and Communications Technology – Bai Hanyong (Phone: 15910769206, Email: [email protected])

Wei Huanxin – GreatOps Community (Phone: 18500255645, Email: [email protected])