ICBC’s R&D Leap: Digital Transformation, AI, and BizDevOps

In response to the Central Financial Work Conference’s call for accelerating the construction of a strong financial nation and advancing digital finance, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) Software Development Center has made digital transformation a core initiative.

1. Sustainable Technology Development

The Center balances development with security, promotes open collaboration alongside independent innovation, encourages product creation coupled with rapid business implementation, aligns technology advancement with management optimization, and pursues high efficiency and quality in processes and financial products.

2. Digital R&D Transformation Roadmap

Since 2021, the Center has been advancing a digital R&D transformation, building a one‑stop collaboration platform, establishing a data foundation, and integrating cutting‑edge technologies to reshape user experience, redesign development processes, and create new operational models.

Figure 1: R&D Digital Framework

The vision is to build a "digital and intelligent" R&D system, with two missions to continuously improve R&D efficiency and organizational digital capability. The three main levers focus on user, data, and operation thinking, while four goals aim to break data silos, create a data middle platform, enable a one‑stop R&D platform, empower frontline work with technology and data, and foster an engineering culture.

3. Accelerating New‑Quality R&D Productivity

A one‑stop enterprise‑level R&D collaboration platform has been created, integrating tools such as ICBC e‑Enterprise Research, e‑Office, and IDE, shifting from "people find data" to "data find people" and improving daily active users to over 10,000.

The Center also built a data middle platform, ingesting data from 13 themes and 291 source tables, providing over 230,000 standardized data services to support digital R&D scenarios.

Figure 2: R&D Data Platform Framework

Since 2018, BizDevOps practices have been introduced, creating a value‑closed loop that quantifies outcomes, automates delivery, and aligns business, product, and operations, exemplified by the credit‑card operation management project achieving a level‑3 BizDevOps assessment.

Figure 3: Value Closed‑Loop

4. Building an Intelligent R&D System

Leveraging AI, big data, and cloud computing, the Center launched an intelligent coding assistant in 2021, releasing a large‑model‑based tool in 2023 that improves code completion, unit‑test generation, code inspection, and automated test case creation, raising AI‑assisted code generation from 22% to 34% with a 25% adoption rate.

The assistant earned the highest 4+ level certification from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) and was recognized as a leading digital transformation case.

Figure 4: Intelligent R&D Direction

5. Re‑energizing R&D Models

By combining BizDevOps with Dev.X.Ops, the Center integrates security, data, AI, and cost considerations throughout the code lifecycle, digitizes processes for visibility and traceability, and uses rule‑based automation to replace manual reviews, achieving a fully digitalized R&D workflow.

Figure 5: Digital R&D Model Reconstruction

Looking ahead, the Center will continue to accelerate AI‑driven innovations across the entire R&D process, deepen AI‑enabled transformation, and sustain high‑efficiency, secure, and innovative R&D productivity to power future business growth.