Trusted Data Ecosystem for Financial Enterprises under China’s Data Space Plan

National Data Space Accelerates Integrated Data Market

Accelerating the construction of a trusted data space is a key measure to promote efficient circulation of data elements and to cultivate a nationwide integrated data market. The State Data Administration recently issued the "Trusted Data Space Development Action Plan (2024‑2028)" which sets the development direction and priority tasks for trusted data construction in China. The plan emphasizes deepening market‑oriented allocation of data elements, facilitating smooth data flow, and building a trustworthy, interoperable, value‑co‑creating data space. By 2028, a broadly interconnected, resource‑concentrated, thriving ecosystem with orderly governance is expected, significantly raising data development, openness, and usage across sectors.

Direction for Financial Enterprise Data Ecosystem

The plan encourages exploration of data space construction in the financial sector. Financial enterprises are urged to seize the opportunity, define ecosystem development goals, overall ideas, and promotion strategies that support the national data market and high‑quality digital economy.

Key Goals, Overall Idea, and Promotion Strategy

Goal: Enable data "supply, flow, use, and security"—high‑quality data supply, efficient cross‑domain flow, effective usage, and robust protection.

Overall Idea: Build trustworthy data‑control capabilities, enhance resource interaction, and strengthen value co‑creation, forming a core capability system for data providers, users, and space operators.

Promotion Strategy: First, advance trustworthy data space capabilities; second, promote trustworthy data space adoption by fostering multi‑party trust, collaborative data sharing, and digital supply‑chain efficiency; third, cultivate industry‑wide trustworthy data space through shared governance, revenue distribution, and collaborative mechanisms, supporting AI model cross‑domain R&D and shifting the industry chain from linear to networked ecology.

Financial Enterprise Data Ecosystem as a Path to Release Data Value

The ecosystem drives internal data sharing, expands to inter‑enterprise flow (second paradigm), and integrates with the national data market (third paradigm). It promotes data supply, demand, and security across four layers: supply (high‑quality data provision), flow (enhanced infrastructure for cross‑domain sharing), market (data catalog, discovery, and usage), and operation (governance, compliance, and safety).

Specific capabilities include:

Building a trustworthy data‑control framework to ensure data provenance, access, and security.

Creating a data‑supply‑demand platform that matches providers with consumers via catalogs and tools.

Facilitating data sharing and collaborative innovation through data services and AI‑driven products.

Dynamic monitoring of supply‑demand balance and risk‑aware security controls.

Linking external data spaces via standardized interfaces, reducing barriers and enabling cross‑ecosystem innovation.

ICBC Software Development Center’s Practice

Guided by the national trusted data space plan, the center aims to build a secure, efficient, open, and collaborative (SEOC) enterprise data ecosystem (D‑ECOS). Key initiatives include:

Blueprint and Enterprise Data Space: Establish internal "controllable, supplyable, verifiable" data ecology and promote inter‑enterprise data flow through partnerships with data merchants and adoption of privacy‑preserving technologies (encrypted computation, controlled plaintext exchange).

Data Factory: Using a low‑code approach, nine end‑to‑end pipelines (source data, thematic aggregation, shared metrics, customer tags, knowledge graph, data products, etc.) enable one‑stop data construction. The "Data‑Empowered Workbench" has been deployed in 38 domestic branches, shortening the data processing chain by 50% and improving development efficiency by roughly 50%.

Data Usage Control: Fine‑grained usage policies and unified security‑privacy controls ensure minimal necessary usage, traceability, and compliance with data classification requirements.

Data‑Intelligent Market: Over 100 data products (e.g., Fund Insight, Smart Map) support marketing, customer service, risk control, and operations. Fund Insight provides real‑time fund‑holding analytics, helping a branch manager adjust client portfolios and earn recognition; the product won the 4th "Jin Xin Tong" fintech innovation award.

Data Catalog and Trustworthiness: Trusted data sources, lineage, and processing standards enable users to quickly locate and trust data assets.

Operational Management: A data development index system evaluates construction (scale, infrastructure, quality, security) and usage (availability, reusability, accessibility, intelligence), guiding decisions and monitoring.

Security Risk Monitoring: Models covering the entire lifecycle detect and mitigate risks, enforcing least‑necessary principles and compliance.

External Data Integration: Standardized ingestion, unified metadata, and shared governance support external data procurement, enabling banks and branches to leverage public data for risk, inclusive finance, and regulatory reporting.

Future Outlook

Under the guidance of the national trusted data space roadmap, financial enterprise data ecosystems will achieve higher efficiency, safety, and trustworthiness, breaking data silos and fostering inter‑enterprise and societal data interconnection. This will generate new commercial models, accelerate the data industry’s growth, and bolster China’s high‑quality digital economy.