How Chinese Banks Accelerate Digital Transformation with DevOps Maturity Assessments

Overview of DevOps Capability Maturity Model Assessments in Banking

Amid the broader push for digital transformation, Chinese enterprises are adopting DevOps to improve IT efficiency. The DevOps Capability Maturity Model series, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), provides a high‑value guide for evaluating and advancing IT capabilities across industries.

Participating Banks and Assessment Count

Joint‑stock banks—including China Merchants Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, CITIC Bank, Ping An Bank, China Everbright Bank, and China Minsheng Bank—have collectively completed 47 DevOps assessments, covering continuous delivery (Level 3), technical operation (Level 2/2+), security & risk management (Level 2), and system & tool evaluations.

Continuous Delivery (Standard 3) Highlights

China Merchants Bank

The bank began exploring DevOps four to five years ago and, two years ago, committed to significant investment. It views DevOps as the foundation for “technology agility” that drives business agility, aiming to improve developer experience, streamline processes, and enhance overall development efficiency.

Key actions include:

Increasing investment in the DevOps toolchain and improving developer experience.

Lightening and automating workflows to capture data throughout the process.

Promoting a cultural shift so that developers understand and apply DevOps principles.

CITIC Bank

The bank evaluated three projects, such as the “New Personal Mobile Banking” system, which faced challenges due to a monolithic architecture and a large team size. After multiple trials, the bank adopted a more suitable DevOps approach, leveraging container‑based pipelines that enabled over 600 daily releases in testing environments.

China Minsheng Bank – Open Platform

The Open Platform project consolidates financial services through APIs, mini‑programs, and cloud‑based ecosystems. Built on the bank’s container cloud with micro‑service architecture, it offers elastic scaling to support millions of daily visits.

Shanghai Pudong Development Bank

Initially evaluated five projects covering internet loan products, micro‑service platforms, cash‑flow analysis, fund‑supervision, and financial IC‑card systems. Challenges included skill development, automation testing, and establishing DevOps metrics. The bank later added eight more projects in Q4 2021, spanning clearing platforms, payment systems, risk monitoring, and smart office solutions.

China Everbright Bank

The bank’s two evaluated projects—POIN (a Java‑based micro‑service development platform) and a cash‑management cloud service—implemented a DevOps measurement framework with 43 metrics covering demand, quality, CI/CD, testing, and deployment, achieving high build success rates and rapid turnaround times.

Security & Risk Management (Standard 6) – Ping An Bank

Ping An Bank’s intelligent due‑diligence system integrates DevSecOps practices via the Starlink platform, embedding security requirements throughout the development lifecycle and ensuring “security‑by‑design” across all stages.

System & Tools (Standard 8) – Ping An Bank Starlink

Starlink serves as the strategic product supporting the bank’s digital transformation, offering an end‑to‑end value‑stream from idea generation to operation monitoring, with built‑in metrics for team efficiency and automated pipelines.

Statistical Summary (as of 26 April 2022)

The following chart shows the number of assessments per bank, sorted by total count. Data originates from the official DevOps assessment website.

About the DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The model, co‑created by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, and leading internet firms, is the first comprehensive DevOps standard in China and has been recognized by the ITU‑T as the world’s first international DevOps standard. It covers agile management, continuous delivery, technical operation, application design, security & risk management, and system & tool components.