Ant Financial’s Fifteen‑Year Technology Architecture Evolution and the Future of FinTech

At QCon 2019, Ant Financial’s Vice‑CTO Hu Xi presented the company’s fifteen‑year technology architecture evolution, outlining the five BASIC technologies—Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Security, IoT and Cloud Computing—that form the foundation of modern fintech and previewing the newly disclosed BASIC College talent‑training system.

The talk emphasized that continual improvement of raw computing power is essential to support both OLTP (online transaction processing) and OLAP (online analytical processing) workloads, and that financial transaction technology relies on high‑availability, distributed middleware and databases. Ant’s self‑developed OceanBase database, built on Paxos for strong consistency, now handles peak loads of 42 million transactions per second across more than 1 000 nodes.

Looking ahead, Ant Financial is driving financial‑grade cloud‑native transformation: middleware capabilities are being exposed as a service mesh, security‑focused containers (including contributions to Kata Containers) provide a trusted execution environment, and a three‑site, five‑center active‑active architecture can recover from a full‑site outage within 25 seconds.

On the data‑intelligence side, Ant advocates an open intelligent computing architecture that unifies storage, offers pluggable compute engines, and presents a smart SQL layer. The architecture integrates batch, streaming, graph and machine‑learning workloads, exemplified by the Ray multi‑modal engine and the SQLFlow framework that makes AI model development as simple as writing SQL.

Finally, the BASIC College program nurtures talent across the five BASIC domains, inviting external experts and encouraging internal engineers to contribute to open‑source projects such as SOFAStack, OceanBase and Kata Containers, while also posting a recruitment call for interested candidates.