How ICBC Accelerated Digital Transformation with XOps: From DevOps to MLOps

Background and Challenge

With information technology entering a "fast lane," data and technology have become core forces driving economic development. The 14th Five‑Year Plan tasks the financial sector with accelerating digital transformation, prompting banks to enhance R&D efficiency, quickly launch financial products, and support enterprise innovation despite intensified competition, evolving customer needs, limited R&D resources, and emerging technologies.

What is XOps?

XOps, driven by technology, business, and other factors, promotes R&D‑operations integration, security building, intelligence, and business value, providing a roadmap for enterprises to achieve digital transformation and maximize business value.

Construction Roadmap

ICBC studied and adopted industry XOps concepts, continuously improving product R&D efficiency and digital competitiveness. 2018 – launched DevOps research; 2019 – applied AIOps for intelligent operations; 2020 – explored DevSecOps and began DataOps/MLOps for rapid data and model delivery; 2021 – built ChatOps service‑oriented operations; 2022 – focused on BizDevOps and FinOps for business value and cost management.

Results

DevOps Practice

Since 2018, ICBC built continuous delivery pipelines across development, business, and data centers. Pilot teams passed the third‑level DevOps standard, achieving the highest industry score for the intelligent advisory product line. By 2020 the practice expanded bank‑wide.

Guided by a "4+4+1" framework, ICBC focused on flow efficiency, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery, leveraging collaboration, continuous delivery, quality assurance, and environment support. The organization fully rolled out DevOps, improving tools, benchmarking, and talent development.

Key outcomes: production patches dropped 5%, development cycle shortened 31%, production deployments rose 149%, average deployment time fell 64.1%, pipeline coverage reached 100%, and over 600 user‑experience issues were resolved.

DevSecOps Practice

In 2020 ICBC became one of the first financial institutions in China to pass the second‑level DevSecOps security maturity assessment, establishing a robust, secure technology support system.

Security was embedded into the software development lifecycle through four pillars: security awareness integration, tool‑built safeguards, metric‑backtracking, and management efficiency. This reduced reliance on individual expertise, integrated security checks into CI/CD pipelines, established comprehensive measurement across security activities, and created standardized, service‑oriented security data assets. The mobile banking team demonstrated significant security improvements, later rolled out across other teams.

DataOps Practice

Leveraging the "Big Data Workstation," ICBC implemented an end‑to‑end DataOps framework. In 2021 the workstation passed the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology’s Data Development Platform assessment, the first bank in the financial sector to do so.

The DataOps platform provides a unified data portal for discovery, exploration, and collaboration; agile data production supporting multi‑language, multi‑scenario development with pipeline orchestration and CI/CD; and intelligent data operations using AI to manage entities, monitor health, build knowledge graphs, and evaluate data value.

These capabilities democratize data analysis, diversify data technologies, and refine business value, enabling data‑driven decisions based on usage and impact.

MLOps Practice

ICBC’s AI Development Platform, built on the MLOps model, received the highest maturity rating from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology in 2021, making the bank the first financial institution to achieve this level.

The platform offers a one‑stop AI development environment with a guided IDE, visual model operations, and end‑to‑end machine‑learning pipelines (data preprocessing, training, validation, deployment). Over 600 models have been developed, deployed, and managed, lowering the barrier for business and technology staff.

AIOps Practice

Addressing operational pain points, ICBC applied machine‑learning algorithms to build an intelligent operations system comprising foundational data, analytics, an AIOps portal, platform support, and integration with existing systems.

Foundational data aggregates logs, monitoring, tracing, and cloud events; analytics structures this data, connects to big‑data and AI platforms, and enables online/offline learning and chaos‑engineering fault drills. The AIOps portal unifies views for incident management, resource optimization, and change advisory, integrating seamlessly with existing monitoring tools.

Since deployment, the system has detected over 500 risk events per month and facilitated more than 100,000 rapid issue resolutions.

ChatOps Practice

To overcome development‑testing‑operations communication barriers, ICBC built a service‑oriented ChatOps system offering 24/7 self‑service changes, multi‑person online collaboration, role‑based authorization, and windowed approvals. Over 150 standardized custom operations services are encapsulated, enabling users to trigger workflows via a white‑screen interface.

More than 400 users have placed 15,000+ tickets, achieving a 100% closure rate with an average resolution time of about one minute—saving over 90% of time compared with traditional methods.

Future Outlook

ICBC’s DevOps implementation has become a cornerstone of its digital transformation, extending into data science, AI (DataOps, MLOps), security (DevSecOps), and intelligent operations (AIOps). The bank will continue to research and apply XOps concepts to further accelerate digital transformation and business growth.

Focus on Business to Maximize Value – Strengthen the integration of technology and business, enhance market sensitivity, and use BizDevOps to align IT, operations, and business for rapid delivery of market‑driven solutions.

Optimize Costs and Strengthen Cost Control – Implement FinOps to bring together technology, business, and finance professionals, refine infrastructure cost management, and achieve finer‑grained financial governance.