How China’s Leading Banks Are Raising the Bar with DevOps Maturity Assessments

On October 26, 2023, the 21st GOPS Global Operations Conference, co‑hosted by the Efficient Operations Community and the DevOps Era Community, took place in Shanghai.

During the event, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) announced the newest batch of DevOps capability maturity assessment results. The assessment, based on CAICT’s "Research and Development Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series of standards, provides important guidance for enterprises implementing DevOps practices.

Among the participating banks, Agricultural Bank of China became the first state‑owned bank to be evaluated against the DevOps Technical Operations standard and also the first to take part in the Agile Development Management standard assessment. Bank of China successfully passed the Security and Risk Management (DevSecOps) assessment, while Bank of Communications passed the System and Tools assessment. Zhejiang Rural Commercial Union Bank was the first rural commercial bank to join the DevOps capability maturity assessment.

01 Agricultural Bank of China evaluated two projects – the Distributed Core Open System Control (OSC) project and the Online Payment Platform – third‑party fast payment module. The bank improved configuration management, achieving 100% completeness and accuracy, enhanced monitoring with over 90% event detection rate, and refined user‑experience processes.

02 The bank also participated in the Agile Development Management assessment with the Data Middle‑Platform Portal project and the User Behavior Data Collection and Analysis Platform project. Over four years, the bank built a full‑process agile development framework, reducing key process time by 40% and improving delivery speed.

03 Bank of China passed the Security and Risk Management (DevSecOps) assessment for its Mobile Banking project.

04 Bank of Communications passed the System and Tools assessment for its Engineering Operations Platform.

05 Zhejiang Rural Commercial Union Bank evaluated the "Harvest Interconnected Mobile Banking" and "Merchant Financial Cloud" projects, enhancing platform quality gates, shortening delivery cycles, and establishing a one‑stop collaboration model among development, testing, and operations.

Statistics (as of October 26, 2023) show the number of assessments completed by state‑owned commercial banks, joint‑stock banks, and city‑level financial institutions.

The DevOps Capability Maturity Model, jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Source Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, and leading internet companies, is the first comprehensive DevOps standard series in China and has been adopted by many enterprises. It was officially concluded by the ITU‑T in July 2020, becoming the world’s first international DevOps standard.

The model covers process (Agile Development Management, Continuous Delivery, Technical Operations), application design, Security and Risk Management (DevSecOps), System and Tools, Business Value Management, Collaborative Development Operations, Continuous Testing, Performance Measurement, Platform Engineering, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

For inquiries about DevOps standard assessments, contact CAICT (Liu Kailin, phone 156 5078 6171, email [email protected]; Bai Hanxiong, phone 159 1076 9206, email [email protected]) or the Efficient Operations Community (Wei Huaxin, phone 185 0025 5645, email [email protected]).