SHENZHEN, China, Nov. 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- WeBank, the world's leading digital bank, has been featured in the Digital Lending Can Turn the Dial on Financial Access for MSMEs report, recently published by the ASEAN Business Advisory Council (ASEAN-BAC) and Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The report recognizes WeBank's performance of delivering Openhive-based distributed digital banking services to ensure a secure, fast and exceptional digital customer experience for MSMEs (micro, small and medium-sized enterprises).

The report reveals how digital banking customers have direct access to manage their banking needs, usually accessible through mobile phones, instead of relying on a teller in traditional bank branches. WeBank's online and unsecured MSEMs loan service "Weiyedai" is a typical case.

An efficient core banking system is the cornerstone of a well-functioned digital bank. Behind the branchless service, WeBank's distributed core banking system is working consistently. Starting from its inception, WeBank has adopted fully distributed technologies to build the first distributed core banking system in China. Because of its similarity to the natural beehive, WeBank calls this set of financial-grade distributed technologies Openhive.

While serving hundreds of millions of individual customers and MSMEs, Openhive enables WeBank to be flexible and scalable to support over 1 billion daily peak transactions. Its record time from new product ideation to live launch is 10 days. The Openhive-based core banking system also leads to affordable equipment and maintenance costs, no branch operation costs and low labor costs. Thus, the bank is enabled to provide 24x7 seamless services (over 99.999% product availability) to a rapidly growing customer base. Its annual IT operation and maintenance cost per account is only 0.3 US dollars/year, roughly one-tenth of the industry average. With the cost-effective banking system, WeBank is able to navigate the innovative path of sustainable inclusive finance.

Besides the successful case of WeBank, the Openhive solution has been adopted by top digital banks in Southeast Asia. Openhive enables them to build distributed core banking systems that could support sustainable inclusive finance to their longtail unbanked and underbanked market. By unleashing the power of collaboration with leading-edge technologies, Openhive is enabling innovators to achieve more.

About Openhive

Openhive is a digital banking solution powered by WeBank, that utilizes a series of distributed technologies to serve inclusive finance. It enables leading digital banks to provide sustainable inclusive finance to the market with competitive advantages, such as high performance, high agility, high availability, high security, high modularity and high efficiency.

About WeBank

Launched in 2014, WeBank Co., Ltd. ("WeBank") is the first privately-owned bank and digital bank in China. WeBank provides more convenient financial services to micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) and the general public, and continuously improves the quality of services in response to customers' specific needs. As one of the top 100 banks in China, WeBank now ranks 284 in Top 1000 World Banks by The Banker. By June 2023, WeBank has served over 370 million individual customers and over 4.1 million MSMEs.

WeBank focuses on innovation and technology. As the first commercial bank to obtain the national high-tech enterprise certification in China, WeBank has maintained its proportion of technical personnel above 50% since its establishment, while its research and development expenses of accounted for around 9% of its revenue. WeBank is now at the top of the industry in core technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, cloud computing and big data.