Singapore. The Asia-Pacific region is becoming the backbone of digital transformation in the global financial industry, according to an executive from Chinese leading tech company Huawei.

An IDC estimate predicts that 44 percent of the top 250 banks in the Asia Pacific will complete the "digital core" transformation by 2025. Asia Pacific is also the region with the largest amount of new digital banking licenses in the world.

“Asia Pacific region is playing an active role in the digital transformation of the global financial industry. Nearly 90 percent of consumers in the Asia Pacific financial sector have now switched to digital services,” said Nicholas Ma, President of Huawei Asia Pacific Enterprise Business Group.

He delivered the remarks during the Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit in Singapore earlier this week.

The three-day conference that began on Wednesday brought together experts and scholars from the IT and finance industries from more than 30 countries around the world. 

It also involved 588 customers and partners from the Asia-Pacific region who attended the conference, covering nine countries and regions. Customers are mainly from Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand to discuss the trend of fintech driving digital transformation in the finance industry.

Nicholas was present to share learnings from Huawei’s experiences of shaping green digital finance in the region.

“Moving forward, business growth, operational resilience, digital innovation, and sustainability will be the focus of the finance industry, which has also become the important engine of the global digital economy,” Nicholas said.

In recent years, Huawei continues to invest in the finance industry and enhance the ecosystem collaboration with global partners, which help to achieve significant growth in this vertical for past years. With the support of 150 global partners, Huawei is serving all major financial institutions in the Asia Pacific, bringing in more than 30 percent year-on-year revenue increase in 2021. 

“To build the green, digital and intelligent finance, we can move faster together only with healthy and sustainable ecosystem collaboration. We plan to enhance the ecosystem collaboration with global partners to match the digital demands from the financial industry based on our fundamental research capability, innovative solutions, technology platform, and Huawei Cloud,” Nicholas points out.

During the gathering, Nicholas also highlights several best practices in the industry. 

“For example, Temenos and Sunline have extended good support for core banking, Netis has put lots of effort on AI Ops including Network Performance Management. Tongdun has contributed to intelligent risk management based on big data, there are a lot of other partners to work together to accelerate the digitalization of the banking industry. Of course, we are expecting more active cooperation with global and local partners in the areas of SaaS, security, and consulting services,” he said

The conference, which ran from July 20-22, was held at Sands Expo and Convention Centre in Singapore. Under the theme of "Shaping Smarter, Greener Finance", it brought together financial industry leading figures, KOLs, academic experts, and innovative practitioners from more than 30 countries around the world to discuss the future development of the financial industry, exploring how to build smarter and greener finance together.