Tencent’s WeBank Touts Openness Strategy at Shenzhen Fintech Day

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Tencent-backed online lender WeBank (微众银行) has stressed its commitment to openness as the core of its fintech strategy during its inaugural Fintech Day in Shenzhen on 26 July.

WeBank used the event to highlight its “3O Open Banking Strategy” (3O开放银行战略), unveiling 10 open source technologies, applications and strategic solution plans.

Ma Zhitao (马智涛), vice-head and chief information officer (CIO) of WeBank, said that centralised technologies were gradually being replaced by distributed technologies, and that business models were gradually transitioning towards a distributed approach.

According to Ma the 3O Open Banking Strategy is the key openness strategy for the future development of the Chinese banking sector, while open source technology is the keystone for WeBank’s implementation of this strategy.

“Distributed commercial models will inevitably transform the commercial environments of the future, and enterprises will become more mature within finely divided sectors,” said Ma.

“Open cooperation will guide the joint establishment of commercial infrastructure by distributed commercial partners, as well as incubate even more innovative commercial models.”

As a provider of distributed commercial infrastructure, WeBank said that it will make its AI, blockchain and other financial-grade applications public and open source, in order to help cooperative partners jointly establish a distributed commercial environment.

In the blockchain sector WeBank has teamed up with the Financial Blockchain Shenzhen Consortium (FISCO) to launch the consortium blockchain-based FISCO BCOS open source platform, as well as the open source WeIdentity initiative to provide technical support for government services in Macau.

WeChat has worked with the official website of the People’s Daily – the flaghip newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, to jointly launch the “People’s Copyright” (人民版权) platform based on FISCO BCOS, which applies blockchain technology to the protection of original content.

WeBank also used its inaugural Fintech Day to unveil its WeAccelerator (We加速) fintech accelerator initiative, which it refers to as a “connector” for the establishment of its “3O Open Banking System.”