Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one global fintech radio show and podcast. I’m Brett King. And I’m Jason Henricks.

Every week since 2013, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services. From incumbents to unicorns and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative, inclusive, and healthy financial future. I’m J.P. Nichols, and this is Breaking Banks.

Welcome to this special edition of the Futurists and the Breaking Banks podcast. We are in Shanghai today, and we have a very special interview for you with the CEO, head of digital finance for Huawei in China. Jason, please introduce yourself.

Hello, I’m Jason, and I’m from the Huawei headquarter, and I’m leading the Huawei Global FSI team. Thank you very much. So we’ve been working together now for a number of years.

My first event with Huawei was in 2016. Jason and I met 2018, I think. Yes.

And every time we get together, we have this very great discussion about fintech around the world, because for Jason, looking after the global platform for financial services for Huawei, and obviously the work that I’ve done with Breaking Banks and Bank 4.0, we are both traveling the world seeing this emerging category of finance. So I thought it would be excellent. But we’re definitely going to get into some of the smarter aspects of finance, some of the emerging technology, and some of the stuff that’s happening in China is amazing.

So we definitely want to dive into that. But let’s start with, you know, we always compare notes. Last time we were in South Africa, the first question you asked me is, what is the big things that you think have happened in the last 12 months? So I’m going to ask you this question.

But before I ask that, I think probably the biggest news in fintech outside of China this year has been the incredible growth of NewBank out of Latin America, Colombian, Brazil, Mexico, passing 100 million customers. Now I think they’re up to 105 million. This is the largest bank now outside of Asia, which is amazing.

Because if you look just five or 10 years ago, people would never have believed that this was possible. So they have more customers than JPMorgan Chase now. Obviously, the Chinese banks are bigger.

We also know Revolut this year became profitable. They’re now bigger than HSBC in terms of their retail customer base. But for you, what have you seen in the last 12 months that you look at and say, oh, that will be interesting.

This could be very big in the future. Or what have you seen that maybe has surprised you in the last 12 months? I think that I firstly agree with you. I see also I visited Brazil two months ago.

I also talked to NewBank and its amazing achievements. Actually, in China, you see the WeBank already almost have 400 million customers. And I think we are in a different part of the world, but we see the digital bank really, really booming.

So for me, I think my observation is like really the mobile payments is now really taking off everywhere of the world. And so this dramatically, I think, lifted the whole industry to a next level. And the customer experience really, really is key.

It drives the change of the industry. And I think the fintech, the digital banks, that’s just a result of the things. On the other side, definitely, I think the giant AI is driving, again, the whole industry to the future.

I think on one side, you see the customer experience, customer expectation. On the other side is the new technology is lifting that. So this, I think, caused a huge, huge shift in the whole industry.

So as, for example, if you’re an incumbent bank, you have to really think about how to move faster. And also, for example, another very big topic is about resilience and the legacy of loading. For example, five years ago, I’ve been talking to many, many giants, big banks.

Everyone talked to me, saying the old technology is going to anyhow out of date. Huge cost, less agility, not easy for innovation, and also lack of talent. Everyone told me they want to shift the platform to the new platform.

It’s hard, right? It’s very hard. It’s not really fast actions. But I think it’s not… The last 12 months, I’ve been talking to these incumbent huge banks.

Everyone is doing that. Yes. Yeah.

I think they feel that the kind of sense of urgency, they have to do it. They got no time if they don’t move to the future. I mean, it’s interesting you see that posture, because obviously you’re working with some of the largest banks in the world, not just here in China, but overseas as well.

And we’ve seen it in the States with JPMorgan Chase and so forth. But there are still a number of banks. There are some banks who’ve decided it’s too hard, like Citibank, moving away from their retail practice.

Because I think they worked out that the cost of this and their capabilities were a challenge. I mean, I’m not speaking for Citibank, but it’s sort of clear now. Do you see at a boardroom level that there is an acceptance that technology is banking from this point forward? Somehow, I think so.

So I think that I read all of your books. So clearly, I think that’s all your points. Actually, I fully agree.

I talk to a lot of banks. And I think a lot of visionary bankers, I think I have already recognized this, they are pushing the bank to move forward. And for sure, also a lot of people not really there, because for them, probably the legacy things are too much, it’s too hard to move.

But if you take a look back to the point, I think there was a very famous banker have told why the bank have to change, have to transform. It’s because of the customer experience. But I think the main thing is right now, the technology, the FinTech guys, the big tech guys, whatever, they have already lifted the customer experience, the expectation to that level.

Yes. Absolutely. If you are incumbent bank, if you cannot reach the same level things, definitely you’ll be left behind.

Probably some banks say there’s a regulatory, huge regulation here. But I think regulation is one thing. We have to fulfill that.

But I think on the other side, the regulation is not just excuse. We do not embrace the technology. We have to do it.

You have to. We have to do it. We both get asked the same question by these big banks, which is, tell us who is the best bank at the world in this.

But what you’re saying is actually, you need to be looking at the tech Fins and the FinTechs. They have the best technology. That’s the benchmark now.

And that’s the difficulty, because they have brand new technology stack, right? With all of the latest technologies. So for them, integrating things like artificial intelligence is much easier, because they have newer technology. We also see it reflected in things like non-performing loans or NPL ratio delinquency rates.

When you look at NewBank’s performance on that, when you look at my bank, Alipay 310, when you look at WeBank’s performance, Alipay in particular, because of their cash flow data, has phenomenal control over bad loans compared with traditional banks, now half of the NPL ratio. But this is largely technology and data modeling. And you can’t get that data, the data’s in silos in the old systems, right? So this is why it’s a challenge.

So let’s talk about resilience, because it’s been a key theme of the Intelligent Finance Summit this year here. We’re talking about injecting artificial intelligence, but also you mentioned payments. Now we’ve seen PICS in Brazil.

We’ve seen UPI in India. These real-time payment rails are taking off. But if we’re looking at AI-based payments, the assumption must be we must have real-time payments infrastructure.

But when you talk about resilience, what does that mean for you in respect to where the infrastructure of financial services is going? What do we need to make it resilient? I think the resilience is a hot topic. And when you drive your system, move forward, and we are facing, we haven’t solved all the existing problems, but new issues come. And there’s a big gap, it’s because the threats, for example, new threats there every day coming.

But especially for the banks, financial institutions have a huge legacy system. It’s very, very hard just to tackle these issues based on this existing system. Because you’re trying to get legacy to perform at real time.

It’s not really built for that. And for example, we have a partner who told me just for the AI fraud and anti-fraud, we have hundreds, even thousands of models for that from your expression. From your expression environment behind you, it will tell this could be a fraud or not.

That’s amazing. But only for that kind of cases, they told me they have several hundreds of models to do that and fraud. So that’s why we think to tackle this increasing threats and existing threats, we really, really have to rethink how to manage the resilience, as we call it, the resilience in the AI area.

So our point is like this, because we are doing quite a lot, many years in the infrastructure, and we think there are four things, yeah, because I will echo your bank 4.0. And that was, I think, a coincidence is really interesting when our team are working on that. Our results or solution is called Bank 4.0. So you said Bank 4.0, yeah, banking everywhere. We think that’s great, that’s our vision.

We think to achieve that from the infrastructure point of view, we need 4.0. So what are the 4.0s? Yeah. The 4.0 is our concept, methodology, and also that is starting point of our solutions. To rethink and rebuild the resilience in the AI era, we have to change the view.

You cannot just look at the system resilience. We should take the resilience from a cost of journey point of view. For example, from the starting point, when the payment starts, and the access point, and then the payment goes through different channels.

And finally, in the call banking system, and so on. 4.0 is firstly, we think it’s zero cost. From the access point of view, and access point to end, we have to make sure end-to-end data.

Complete trust. Yeah, trust. Data.

Data trust. Data safe. Yeah.

We have the solutions. Yeah. For example, antiracism, that is right now a big, big, big issue for the industry.

And the second, I think, is zero weight. When a transaction, or whatever, payment is over there, you have to make sure the customer don’t wait long. Don’t think, don’t think two minutes, two seconds, one second, there’s no difference.

There’s huge difference. You know, in the banking here in China, we can, through the end-to-end optimization, we can achieve 50 milliseconds for the transactions. Anywhere in China? Yeah.

50 milliseconds. This is on the Huawei cloud stack? Yes. Because, you know, you have the cloud, yeah, for your different channel system, the core banking system, and also the different processing system over there, and the hardware, cloud software.

You have to make sure end-to-end, you know, and latency, which is very customer friendly. You know, when customer is over there, when they enjoy the 50 milliseconds, next time if you do longer, it could be an issue. Yes.

Yeah? Yes. Especially… You’re training them. Yeah.

Especially when, in the peak time, when all the transactions, tens of times, hundreds times growth, in this case, if the latency is longer, it may fail. We have been talking to a lot of banks, they’ve been told that there’s issues. They have never faced it before, you know, when the volumes of transactions… Low latency banking.

Low latency is really, really important. And the third one, we think it’s zero downtime. That is really critical.

Which means, yeah, no any disruptions of the services. That is really a big issue. For banking, very critical.

Today, we see around the world, when the mobile payment is booming, I see a lot of banks, in the peak time, that’s true. The transaction volume goes 10 times, even 100 times. Actually in China, we’ve been facing these issues, yeah, 10 years ago.

I think it’s almost 12 years ago. You know, China mobile payment starts in 2011. Yes.

I see, at that time, you know, in a double 11 day, it’s really, really funny. The first single… You call it double 11, singles day, right? Double 11 day. It’s a national shopping day.

But this was some clever marketing from these guys. Yes, yes. You see, today, we’ve been talking to a lot of countries, they are facing this problem.

Yes. Yeah. And… Especially, I mean, one of the things we focus on is during natural disasters, how do we keep digital payments going? Exactly.

Natural disasters or different reasons, make sure there are no disruption. We call it zero downtime. But zero downtime is not an easy thing.

We think it’s not just a technology, not just a product. It’s more important is the whole architecture design. Yes.

How the architecture looks like, the whole system, even the people’s skill. Yeah. Yeah.

That’s why we are working on that. The last one, zero, I think it’s about operation. Zero proof.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s about operation.

So, how to make sure that… We call it zero touch. Okay. How to make sure that operation is much easier, as like autonomous driving.

Because for example, when we talk to a big bank in China, huge one, it told me when they use mainframe, such a huge bank, I can tell you, and several hundreds of millions of customers they have. They only have, I think, 70 or 80 people to operate the system. That’s enough.

Wow. But today, when you go to the cloud architecture, one machine becomes thousands of machines. You have tens of thousands of machines, a lot of connections, hardware, software, they really, really bring a huge complexity for the maintenance.

When some issue happens, normally the problem is you cannot fix, find it even, what is the issue in time. That’s why we think it is extremely important to zero touch. That means you can operate it without human interference, human error.

The whole system works. Self-maintaining. Yeah.

Self-maintaining. That is the idea. Now, if we look at Huawei Cloud, in terms of the development of this, you’ve gone towards more of an edge computing architecture, I understand.

What comes after edge computing? Is it autonomous architecture or how do you think of cloud infrastructure for banks emerging in the future, in the next 10 years or so? I think definitely we have to embrace the technology, that’s the chance. Definitely. I think cloud is the chance.

It’s necessary. Yeah, it’s necessary. But it doesn’t mean we all go with the same model of cloud.

Right. Okay. Because every country, every bank has its own gene, its own regulation.

I think we have to find, every organization has to find its best path, strategy for the cloud. So basically we think, and that’s why we think a kind of hybrid cloud is the right choice. Yeah.

Yeah. Because the bank somehow, on one hand, you have to always embrace the latest technology as much as possible. Because I think this cloud provider can make it for you.

You don’t need to do it in-house. On the other hand, we have to think about the critical services, data. You cannot also put everything into the public.

That’s why we see around the world, different countries have different strategy, policy or regulation. So we’ve been talking to many, many banks. I think right now the best way is this hybrid cloud strategy.

Some part in a private base, some part is in a public base, and with a converged architecture. Actually that is what we are doing. You cannot say, you know, everything just go to the private cloud.

No, no, no. That is that. Because we have to consider each country, each bank has its own situation.

But every bank has to be on the cloud in the future. Yeah. We think so.

That’s definitely the trend. Otherwise, if you are not there, you will be left behind. You can’t do real time, et cetera.

Yeah. Let’s talk about infrastructure in China generally for a moment, because we’ve seen incredible advances in infrastructure here in China in the last 10 years or so. Not just the Belt and Road Initiative, but we have like 50,000 kilometers of smart rail networks, high speed rail, rather, in China.

We have, last year, 50% of all the solar farms and panels deployed in the world were deployed in China. So China is taking infrastructure, 21st century infrastructure, very seriously, right? I think in China, you can see, that’s why I know you have a lot of friends around the world. It’s better than themselves to come here to have a look.

Yes, I agree. Have a look. When you talk about central bank regulation, as I mentioned, each country has its own consideration.

But basically talking, I think in China is quite unique, because we are, all of the society are moving to a very, very, I think, digital-driven economy. You talk about China has the 21st century infrastructure, probably, I believe so. Because here, really, this, I think, a very, very well-established infrastructure really helped China to move to a digital economy.

I can share with you a figure that is not from us, it’s from McDonald’s. I think one year ago, the McDonald’s just in their investor, whatever, they disclosed a figure that they said in China, the digital order in McDonald’s, the ratio is more than 90%. Wow.

Yeah. And they also put together, they are the top six market in McDonald’s, the top six market. They said the average digital order ratio is 40%.

Right, so China is more than double. More than double. Yeah.

Yeah. That’s why I want all the people come here. The same is true for mobile payments, the same is true for the drive, ride-sharing, everything.

The point is, it’s not just the order, it’s not just the consumer. Right now, if you go to the McDonald’s shop in China, you very rarely see the people order in the shop, talk to the people order, or even not many people order in the screen and they insert a card. No.

More than 90% of people are already done with order with their phones. Actually the whole chain, for example, the supply chain, the restaurant management, many things with that store, the whole chain already be very much digitalized. So we have to think about it.

This is the future. Actually, it’s happening in China. McDonald’s is just one page of China.

Almost everywhere is looking like this. So as a banker or financial institute, we have to be thinking how to be totally involved with digital. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you are not digital, how can you do this? You can’t be involved in these digital businesses. Yeah, digital business. But actually, this is the future.

So we think in China, for sure, the regulator give a lot of encouragement for people to try technology. For sure, you have to consider the risks. But to the whole society, it’s really, really, I think, give us a good example of how banks should do.

Excellent. You’re listening to The Futurists and Breaking Banks. We’re with Jason Tsao from Huawei Digital Finance.

We’re going to take a quick break and we’ll be right back. Become a leader in the emerging fintech space through NYU Stern’s Master of Science in fintech program. This is a one-year part-time program divided into one online and six on-site modules that take place in New York and in rotating global locations.

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To learn more about the program, submit your resume for a candidacy review at stern.nyu.edu Welcome back to The Futurists and Breaking Banks with Jason Tsao from Huawei. Jason, we talk a lot about generative AI. It’s a very hot topic around the world.

Of course, we are seeing the use of generative AI, particularly right now with the large language models in terms of chatbots and these types of things. We see platforms like Midjourney, Dali, Stable Diffusion doing generative artwork and things like this. But we have also seen, for ChatGBT, for example, these hallucinations.

And when we talk about generative AI in finance, we can’t afford to have hallucinations, particularly if it’s involving financial transactions. In the West, at this point, ChatGBT can’t do generative finance for this reason. It needs to be trained on financial transaction models.

But apart from a couple of small efforts offshore and NewBank’s recent acquisition, we still don’t have any stable models for large LLMs, for the banking transactional generative finance. What about the work that you’re doing in this respect for LLMs? Have you got a project here? And if so, for generative finance, how are you getting the data for building this LLM? Actually, the gen-AI is definitely the hot topic we’ve been talking about for the last two years. And we think, anyhow, from the long run, it’s definitely disruptive technology, and it brings huge changes to us, to the whole society, for sure.

So I think right now we are still in the early stage, so-called intelligent world, or AGI, or intelligent bank. But we think it’s not just because we think we are still in the early age, and we say, OK, we still have time, just wait. So what we see is this is something, exploration, you have to keep doing that.

And today we see that the leading financing organizations are already doing a lot there. From doing digital, moving to doing AI. Actually, a lot of them have already found out the real scenarios, they think the value is over there.

They are moving there. For example, in China, where we’ve been working with a very large bank, to now they have already implemented more than 100 business cases with gen-AI, in more than 20, I think, business lines. And right now we think there’s a couple of very interesting observations.

Firstly, we see for these leading banks who are already doing that, firstly, they already moved this gen-AI use case from the experimental to big-scale productions. For example, like the branch automation, it’s more than 10,000 branches they have already massively using. It’s there.

The second finding is that the way they use AI, the business cases are already moving from the efficiency-based business case to a value-added business case. Efficiency means if you have thousands of call center people, they use that, they can dramatically shorten the service time and they improve the service quality. We were talking about that with WeBank, who 98% of their customer inquiries are handled by AI.

Which is incredible. But I think right now they have already found the benefit there, they are already moving this gen-AI use case into the value-added area. And the third observation is that we see it’s moving from the single functional use by gen-AI to a multi-functional use, which is AI agent, which can do the orchestration and so on.

Already can put multi-functions together, which is much, much easier for the bank’s people. It would seem to me, and I’m just testing this assumption, but we talked about WeBank with 400 million customers, which would make it maybe the number three or number four bank by number of customers in China. Because ICBC has what, 650 million, I think? I think more than that.

More than that, 700 million. And Agricultural Bank, similar? Same level. Bank of Communications, about 200 million? More than that.

More, okay, all right. So big, big banks, so they’ve got a lot of data to train LLMs. But if you’re HSBC with 39 million or even Wells Fargo or B of A, they don’t have that sort of scale.

So Chinese banks would seem to have an advantage from a data perspective. But is there any effort that you see either here in China or elsewhere where banks are saying we should pool our data to make better generative finance engines? Or is it just bank by bank right now? I think basically bank by bank. Because you think like with open banking, we should have access to all the data, right? Yeah, for sure.

Ideally, yeah, if you put everything together, it would be much easier. But I think the bank, each bank has their own data. But the good thing is in China, from the large language model, we already have all data as much as possible there.

And the bank also, on top of that, they put a lot of banking industry data. And then there’s their own data for the training. Interesting.

Yeah. But the point is data quality. For sure, data, if you have more data, it’s good.

But only more data is not good enough. You have to do the quality of the data. Quality of the data.

I think the bank in China doing very well is data governance, they do quite well. To make sure you have the bank’s data, but a lot of high quality data, they will be much, much, I think, better for the model. We talked about mobile payments.

Obviously, now we have, I don’t know what the current statistics are, but in terms of retail commerce, it must be 93, 94% of payments are mobile now in China. It’s phenomenal. Since 2014, particularly, where this has changed.

Are you seeing the wallet platforms, WeChat Pay and Alipay use artificial intelligence also? Sure. Yeah? Sure. So this is just pervasive now in the system.

Yeah. That’s very cool. That’s very cool.

I mean, if you are talking to banks about the customer experience in five or 10 years with AI, what is Huawei’s messaging about how AI is going to change the customer experience for an individual? Okay. So I think maybe we start from a car story. You know, in this conference, I think our rotating chairman, he just said, we will try the best to provide a car solution to make sure everyone really have an autonomous driving car, which means when you are in the car, yeah, you can just sleep.

Right. Okay. Then when you wake up, you are there.

Okay. Right. Same with finance.

Yes. For sure. I know there’s a lot of arguments.

Yeah. Sure. The regulation, whatever.

But this is the intent. Yes. Intent.

Actually, this is almost already there. Yeah. Yeah.

I’d like to invite your friends, the audience to come to China. You know, I often have a lot of customers from all over the world. When they are here, I’m telling them, this is already the facts, the reality here.

They even don’t believe it. Yeah. And we let them go into the car and drive for 10 minutes.

Oh, they say, okay, we are here. Because Huawei is also an infrastructure company. You work on neuromorphic chipsets for autonomous vehicles and autonomous supply chain systems and things like that.

So you guys know where this technology is at. It’s not in the future now. It’s happening right now.

We’re transitioning to this sort of autonomous technologies, right? Yeah. Autonomous. I think for the finance industry, we should also go that direction.

Absolutely. We have to. Yeah.

How can you provide financial infrastructure for the autonomous world if you don’t have autonomous finance, AI, machine-to-machine types of transactions? Yeah. In terms of the banking environment and generative AI, we’ve talked about that extensively. But from a regulatory perspective, do you think the regulator in China will also have to inject artificial intelligence into their operations and infrastructure? Yes.

Definitely. Yeah. Definitely.

And so we haven’t had clear guidance on that as yet, but we do have AI regulation, very mature AI regulation already in place. I think they’re working on that. They’re already something there.

But you see, it’s so fast. The development is so fast. You cannot just have a complete and clear guidance for now and for tomorrow.

I think it’s going so fast. They already have something, but I think they’re still working on that because we see the banks. I think this definitely needs a multi-party working together for that.

I mean, you keep talking about speed and fast. And this is not something we normally associate with regulators. They normally are very measured and take things slow, but this is definitely a change.

They’re going to have to move faster because the rate of change is speeding up. Exactly. So if you want to keep policy and regulation to match the speed of the industry, you also have to speed up.

That presents challenges, though, because regulator now goes from setting policy and creating rules to now being part of the infrastructure and having to move at the same speed. So they become technology focused infrastructure, and now they have to attract talent and they have to build their own technical capability. This is a big change for regulators around the world.

This is also I see worldwide the regulator are trying to do. And Huawei has a very good relationship with the regulators, not only here in China, but elsewhere in the world as well. Right.

You speak often with central bank people, right? We’re trying to work with, because central bank on one hand is also the customer of us. They have their own technology needs. Right.

Exactly. On the other hand, also, we have to understand what the regulator wants to do. You know, you provide the technology.

You must fulfill what they require. Right. That’s why we’ve been talking to a lot, also a lot of regulators, central bank worldwide to understand that.

All right. So let’s finish the conversation in this way. When we look around the world at what is happening in terms of artificial intelligence, I use the term smart economies of the future.

These are economies that have a lot of technology, AI, autonomy, you know, self-driven systems, as you would put them, in the economy itself. And in this respect, China has become very aspirational. There’s a lot of pride in the technological advancements that China is making, the growth of the middle class and so forth.

But we have still many ways to go. You know, the health care system, we need to improve that around the world, obviously banking infrastructure and so forth. Yeah, we’re quite proud of the achievements we have done.

The people are also really enjoying, yeah, the benefits which technology brings to us. You know, my parents, they’re 70 years old, can you imagine, we help them, educate them right now, they’re very happy with the phone, go everywhere to pay, yeah, to do whatever. You know, I remember some years ago, my dad still keeps a lot of cash with him, but right now he’s very happy.

I think that definitely we’re proud and enjoy the benefit from the technology bring to us. This really improve the efficiency of the whole society, yeah, and the people’s experience. I think that we are moving to that, still keep moving that.

You know, when you see a whole society reach that level, digital level, you know, it bring a lot of, we call it multi-effects, everywhere you see the efficiencies grow. For sure, on the other hand, we have to make a lot of reflections, because a lot of new technology bring us new issues, we have to solve the issues. But generally speaking, you know, things always have two sides, we are very, very, I think, and confident about the future, and you know, Chinese people working very hard, very resilient, and we are very good at the reflections, and when we see the problems, we will, I think, think about how to solve the problems, and not stop because of the problems.

This week in Shanghai, we had two typhoons in one week, right? Which now, obviously, the second typhoon didn’t hit Shanghai as hard, but when we talk about resilience of infrastructure, we have to talk about weather resilience now as a global thing. But there is a program to update infrastructure as well. If we look at Shenzhen, where Huawei is based, where the campus is based, it’s one of the most amazing technological cities in the world.

And you’ve just explained where China is already a digital economy. But how do you make sure that that digital function doesn’t fail if there’s extremes in weather or things like this? Well, maybe instead, let’s talk about this. Tell us, for those people that haven’t been to Shenzhen, which I think is one of the most amazing cities in the world, talk to people about what Shenzhen as a city is like in terms of the digital infrastructure.

Shenzhen is a city, you know, please just comment. Shenzhen’s city is, I think, just around 40 years old, from a small fishing village. Right now, it’s a city of 20 million people.

And it’s always been seen as the first city in China. It’s a symbol of China since the openness and the reform. And also people call it like a Silicon Valley of China.

A lot of IT companies, innovations come from here. Tencent is based there and others. Yes.

And a lot of high-tech companies are here. We’ve been rooted here. Why did Huawei choose Shenzhen as the headquarters? I think, maybe you can go ask our founders, by chance.

I think that’s a good time in China. All the young people come to Shenzhen to develop the business. It’s quite a young city, not only 40 years old, but young population.

Yes. My answer would be, I won’t say too much, just come, look, see it, experience it. If you want to see the future, definitely come to visit Shenzhen.

All right, so let’s sign off. But you know, I always like to talk about the future a little bit. And you say this is my job.

That’s my job. But so, let me talk about how the world could be reshaped in the future and see if this aligns with the way you think. Because I talk about this a lot, that if we’re thinking about, you can do advancement of technology and AI at an economy level easier than you can do cross-border, so you have to tackle.

If we’re going to apply AI cross-border, because otherwise the automation finishes at the border. So I think there’s interesting elements there. All right, so let’s finish off the conversation with this.

In the next 12 months, for your practice at Huawei on the digital finance side, what are some of the things that are exciting for you that you are now wanting to take to the rest of the world? Okay, that’s a good point. I think there are two things always, I think, excite us or encourage us to move. The first thing is to, we have to keep exploring the future, which is, I think, the new technology brings to us.

Keep pushing the boundaries, right? Yeah, like the general AI and so on. We have to, you know, that’s a way to remove the limits and move faster to keep exploration. Second thing, it’s also to help our customers to tackle the technology debt.

Yes. You know, if you do not tackle that problem. You won’t have to worry about it too much longer because you won’t be existing.

If you want to run faster, you have a big, big burden with that. But which we think it’s a, it is a huge, huge challenge for the industry because every day we talk about very, you know, exciting things. But I mean, look at, oh, you cannot move on because of the technology debt.

And that’s why, especially when AI is coming, when I see the industrial customers, the sense of urgency is increasing. This encourage us to move, to work with them, to solve this. It’s very interesting when we had ICBC, it’s Gaosheng, what was his name? Yeah, he spoke the other day and he said, he made the point about moving transactions off the mainframe to the cloud.

That’s a specific metric that they use now for measuring the success of their transformation, which for me, that in itself, just that one statement shows how Chinese banks are thinking about this now. I haven’t heard any banks in the West talk about how many of their mainframe instructions they’ve moved to the cloud. So this is, I think, illustrative of the advancement that’s being made.

Jason, you know, for people that are interested in what’s happening here in China with Huawei and so forth, because we don’t hear as much about this progress and the amazing things you’re doing. How can people that are listening to this now find out more about Huawei? And where can they find out more about yourself and follow your work at Huawei? Okay. Firstly, the way you can open the website and take a look at what Huawei is doing.

And for sure, we have a lot of connections with global financial organizations and we are still working globally for each country. And just here is my invitation. I hope you can come to China and take a look at what is happening.

You know, if this changes, exciting, excites us, then we will bring our global customers to China. I think the progress we see excites them. I can tell you, it’s, you know, a lot of things probably you never thought or never done before.

As you mentioned, a huge bank already moved all of their business from the old technology platform to a purely cloud-based technology platform, including the core banking. Some of the biggest banks in the world. In fact, the biggest banks in the world.

Yes. I think this is a must and this is the way we have to do it. But there’s probably China, it’s a unique place.

The huge banks have already done that. A lot of people told me, oh, that seems impossible. When you are here, see the progress, you see, oh, that’s totally possible.

You have the case here. Yeah, that’s why you’re welcome to China and take a look. And you’ve repeatedly made the point is that because of the openness that the central bank had in the early days towards these technology innovators like Ali and Tencent, because that accelerated change, the banks felt they had to respond to this.

Because of the customer experience is there as a bank, that is a key. Jason Tsao, thank you very much for joining us today. And if you’re going to take one thing away from our conversation today, it should be Jason’s invitation.

If you want to see the future of banking, if you want to see the future of the world’s economy, if you want to see how artificial intelligence is going to change the world, the best place in the world to see this happening right now is here in China. Come and visit China. You might be surprised.

That’s it for another week of the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks. This episode was produced by our US-based production team, including producer Lisbeth Severance, audio engineer Kevin Hirsham, with social media support from Sylvie Johnson. If you like this episode, don’t forget to tweet it out or post it on your favorite social media or leave us a five star review on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Facebook or wherever it is that you listen to our show.

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