Key Computing Capabilities Driving the Evolution of Digital Financial Services

2016 Yunqi Conference Share Transcript

The topic discussed is closely related to everyday life, focusing on the relationship between computation, finance, and daily living.

About twelve years ago, the speaker was a junior engineer in a tiny four‑person team building a 4,000‑line code system called Alipay. Over the past twelve years, Alipay‑based platforms have transformed daily life: mobile‑only payments, facial‑recognition wallets for seniors, voice‑driven ride‑hailing for the visually impaired, and micro‑loans for pastoral communities.

This upgrade is driven by continuous innovation in computing: ever‑growing scale of data, richer categories, and self‑learning algorithms. The speaker identifies nine key computing capabilities that link fundamental computing power to financial life: transaction, service, connection, decision, analysis, intelligence, identity verification, trust, and experience.

The speaker will now share major breakthroughs of these nine capabilities over the past decade and the new challenges expected in the next ten years.

1. How to reliably, efficiently, and cost‑effectively process billions of transactions per second

Ten years ago, a system handling a few thousand transactions per second was world‑class. With mobile internet, transaction volume exploded, and Alipay became the first system capable of over 100,000 transactions per second, later reaching millions per second for New Year red‑packet processing. Recent upgrades include running the core accounting system on the OceanBase distributed financial database and migrating 50% of Double‑11 traffic to Alibaba Cloud, demonstrating that domestically developed databases, cloud OS, middleware, and applications can now support the busiest global financial platforms.

Future financial platforms will need to handle 100 million transactions per second to support the Internet‑of‑Things era, where devices, not just people, transact valuable assets.

2. How to keep a gigantic system of billions of lines of code and millions of servers robust and agile

From 4,000 lines and a few servers to billions of lines and tens of thousands of servers, the system’s scale keeps growing. Distributed services, layered architecture, modularization, and cloud computing currently manage this size, but as the system expands further it must become self‑managing—possessing a “brain” that can self‑adapt, self‑manage, and self‑evolve.

3. How to achieve real‑time, secure, collaborative flow of funds, services, and data across billions of autonomous nodes

Connectivity is a core capability. Innovations such as quick‑pay (linking wallet and bank accounts), QR‑code and acoustic payments, and the integration of Yu‑E‑Bao with Alipay illustrate how connections enable ubiquitous financial services. Ant Financial now connects hundreds of millions of users, millions of merchants, and thousands of institutions, forming a massive network that must remain safe and efficient as it scales to tens or hundreds of billions of autonomous nodes.

4. How to perform real‑time, precise, low‑cost deep‑model decisions at the scale of billions per second

Every payment triggers dozens of decisions, many of them security‑related. To support future volumes of 100 million transactions per second, the platform must execute tens of billions of decisions per second. Ant’s decision platform has evolved from a traditional database‑based system to a multi‑generation architecture that separates lightweight engines for simple decisions from heavyweight engines for complex ones.

5. How to let machines perceive the world in real‑time, accurately, and with fine granularity

We have moved from an “information age” to a “data age” where machines can directly understand data, extract information, and generate knowledge. Ant’s risk‑control system now uses a “security brain” that learns from massive data to evaluate each transaction’s risk, providing real‑time, detailed insight essential for inclusive finance.

6. How to make machines act as financial‑service experts, delivering VIP‑level experiences to everyone

To provide personalized services to billions of users, Ant relies on AI. In the 2020 Double‑11 event, its intelligent service robot handled 94% of requests, processing over 1.5 million inquiries daily, illustrating the path toward machine‑driven expert financial assistance.

7. How to enable machines to recognize and authenticate each person in a natural, authentic way

Biometric recognition combined with big data is the key to secure, natural identity verification. Ant’s facial‑recognition technology is already widely deployed across financial scenarios, and continued research aims to fully solve natural, remote authentication.

8. How to make the digital world immutable, authentic, and trustworthy

Blockchain provides distributed, cryptographic guarantees that make digital assets tamper‑proof and trustworthy. Ant is researching core blockchain technologies and applying them to build trust chains for scenarios such as online public‑welfare.

9. How to fuse the digital, physical, and spiritual worlds

Emerging technologies—IoT, virtual reality, and augmented reality—are blending the three realms, creating new immersive financial experiences. The speaker previews a video demonstrating these possibilities.

In summary, the past decade’s breakthroughs in cloud computing, big data, mobile internet, AI, biometrics, blockchain, IoT, and XR have powered digital inclusive finance (FinTech 1.0). Looking ahead, FinTech 2.0 will focus on AI breakthroughs, biometric identity, blockchain trust, IoT, and immersive reality to solve the nine computing challenges and create a better world.

Ant Financial plans to combine its core technologies—OceanBase distributed financial database, financial‑grade middleware, big‑data processing, mobile development capabilities, credit, risk control, intelligent services, and biometrics—with Alibaba Cloud’s AI and computing power to build a next‑generation financial cloud platform for 50,000 global financial institutions.