How Traditional Banks Are Overcoming IT Ops Challenges in the Digital Age

When traditional banks begin shifting toward internet finance, they must not only revamp their image but also leverage various Internet+ tools to become broader financial service providers, requiring a transformation of their IT architecture and systems to support greater business value and a more complete digital ecosystem.

Traditional Finance's Four Major Challenges

Rapid growth in online transaction volume overwhelms existing organizational structures.

Seamless collaboration between operations and development is hindered by strict policy‑driven separation of duties.

Operations staff growth cannot keep pace with the expanding demands of development and business.

Regulators and customers demand extremely high availability and security, far exceeding typical enterprise standards.

Operations Work Also Under Pressure

At the 2017 China Application Performance Management Conference, Zhang Jianlin explained that functional requirements come from business, while non‑functional requirements—such as storage, network, compute resources, stress testing, and performance tuning—are raised by operations to ensure the system can support activities like flash‑sale events.

He emphasized that operations now proactively engage with business units early, estimating workloads and identifying performance bottlenecks before deployment, rather than reacting after traffic spikes.

Self‑Reliance Breaks Deadlock

Zhang identified two main operational philosophies: DevOps, which treats development and operations as a unified whole, and Google’s SRE model, which he finds more practical for real‑world implementation. He also highlighted automation as essential, noting that managing thousands of X86 servers manually is impossible.

At China Merchants Bank, the operations team builds its own automation tools tailored to the bank’s unique applications, environment, and staffing, enabling high‑availability delivery and reducing reliance on external vendors.

Next Focus of Operations

Looking ahead, Zhang sees three shifts: (1) Traditional financial institutions will increasingly collect online customer behavior data for big‑data analytics, with operations providing the necessary data platforms; (2) The industry’s focus will continue moving online, requiring architectural redesign and migration to decoupled, X86‑based platforms to handle high concurrency and growth; (3) Ongoing emphasis on building resilient, automated infrastructures.