Alibaba’s cloud unit is working with a municipal lender in the central Chinese province of Henan on the development of a mobile banking platform.
Alibaba Cloud and Bank of Pingdingshan announced on 8 February that they had entered a cooperative agreement to “accelerate the creation of a full-bank unified mobile foundational technology platform, to support digitised operation and multi-vector mechanism innovations.”
Under the cooperative agreement Bank of Pingdingshan will create a “mobile foundational technology platform” using Alibaba Cloud’s mPaaS mobile development platform.
Bank of Pingdingshan said that this will “reshape the digitised channel experience and support operational development with greater efficiency and lower cost, as well as create a services platform that integrates offline with online.”
Bank of Pingdingshan is one of five municipal banks in the province of Henan, and as of the end of 2020 had total assets of 112.951 billion yuan.
Alibaba Cloud bills the mPaaS mobile development platform as a “mature financial-grade mobile-end development solution plan,” that already supports a range of apps in China including Alipay, 12306 and Dingding, and provides services to banks including Agricultural Bank of China, Guangfa Bank, Huaxia Bank, Bank of Xi’an and Bank of Nanjing.
Alibaba Cloud is currently the leading player on China’s financial cloud market, according to a recent report from research consultancy IDC. 60% of insurance companies and 50% of securities companies are its customers, as well as 80% of listed commercial banks in China.
