How China’s Leading Banks Accelerate IT Efficiency with DevOps Maturity Assessments

Overview of DevOps Capability Maturity Model

In the context of digital transformation, enterprises adopt DevOps to improve IT efficiency. The “R&D‑Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model” series, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), provides strong guidance for industry.

Participating Joint‑Stock Banks and Project Count

State‑owned joint‑stock banks such as China Merchants Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, CITIC Bank, China Minsheng Bank, China Everbright Bank, Ping An Bank and Zheshang Bank have taken part in the DevOps capability maturity assessments, totaling 48 projects.

Bank‑Specific Cases

China Merchants Bank – Strategy

CMBC began exploring DevOps four to five years ago and intensified investment two years ago. The bank views DevOps as the foundation for agile technology that supports business agility, improving developer experience, streamlining development activities, and enhancing overall efficiency.

Key focus areas include expanding the toolchain, simplifying processes, automating workflows, and fostering a cultural shift among developers.

CITIC Bank – Three Projects in One Evaluation

CITIC Bank evaluated projects such as the “New Personal Mobile Banking” system, a high‑complexity A‑class application with a hundred‑person team. Initial scores were low, prompting multiple iterations to adapt configuration management and continuous delivery methods to the large‑scale, partially monolithic architecture.

The bank also built a container‑based DevOps pipeline, achieving over 600 daily releases in the test environment, far exceeding the original target of 100 releases.

China Minsheng Bank – Open Banking Platform

The Minsheng Open Platform consolidates financial services through APIs, mini‑programs and cloud solutions, creating an ecosystem that breaks traditional boundaries. Built on a container cloud with micro‑service architecture, it supports millions of concurrent accesses with elastic scaling.

Shanghai Pudong Development Bank – Multiple Projects

Initial five projects covered a new internet loan product, an enterprise micro‑service platform, cash‑flow analysis, fund‑supervision, and an IC‑card system, spanning Java and C languages and various architectures.

Challenges included skill development, automation testing, and establishing a DevOps measurement framework with 43 metrics covering demand management, quality, CI/CD, testing and deployment.

In the fourth quarter of 2021, eight additional systems were evaluated, ranging from a unified clearing platform to risk monitoring and smart office management, demonstrating extensive adoption of DevOps practices.

China Everbright Bank – Two Projects

The bank’s self‑developed POIN platform provides a Java‑based micro‑service foundation for over 300 systems. The Cash Management Cloud Service offers comprehensive corporate treasury functions, achieving metrics such as 60+ daily builds, >90% success rate, 16‑minute build time and sub‑2‑hour fix turnaround.

Zheshang Bank – Industrial‑Chain Finance Service Platform

The platform addresses financing challenges for SMEs by offering online financing, settlement and fund management for upstream suppliers, distributors and individuals, accelerating sales for core enterprises and delivering end‑to‑end supply‑chain financial services.

Assessment results show improvements in delivery cycle, build speed, code quality, testing efficiency and reduced production incidents.

Ping An Bank – Intelligent Due‑Diligence System (Security & Risk Management)

The system integrates security throughout the DevOps lifecycle via the Starlink platform and DevSecOps practices, ensuring “requirement‑driven detection” and embedding security controls in tools and processes.

Ping An Bank – Starlink Platform (System & Tools)

Starlink is a strategic product supporting Ping An’s digital transformation, providing an end‑to‑end value‑stream pipeline, automated SDLC, fine‑grained metrics and compliance with regulatory and security requirements.

Significance of the Standard

The DevOps Capability Maturity Model, jointly developed by CAICT, leading internet companies and industry experts, is the first comprehensive DevOps standard in China and was accepted by the ITU‑T in July 2020 as the world’s first international DevOps standard. It covers agile management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security & risk management, and system & tool domains.