Huawei hosted the Financial Services Industry Summit as part of Huawei South Africa Connect 2026, bringing together banking leaders, insurers, technology experts and ecosystem partners under the theme “Beyond Digital: Leaping into the Fintelligent Era”.
The summit, held last month in Johannesburg, explored how artificial intelligence (AI), resilient digital infrastructure and industry collaboration are helping financial institutions unlock greater business value and accelerate intelligent transformation.
Opening the summit, Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Digital Finance Business Unit, says banking is entering a new era where competitive advantage will increasingly depend on how organisations apply AI to deliver measurable business value.
Through our hybrid AI architecture, Huawei empowers financial institutions to harness massive compute power, ensuring every AI token drives tangible business value
— Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Digital Finance Business Unit
“As open-source models cross the trillion-parameter threshold, AI is evolving from open architecture to open compute. In an era where compute is productivity, competition in banking has shifted to token efficiency and real-world value creation,” says Cao.
He adds that “trillion-parameter models like Kimi K3 prove that open source has officially become mainstream in banking”.
“Through our hybrid AI architecture, Huawei empowers financial institutions to harness massive compute power, ensuring every AI token drives meaningful outcomes,” notes Cao.
Building on this vision, Alvin Feng, president of Huawei’s International Business Unit of Digital Finance, introduced Huawei’s digital finance solution framework.
It combines autonomous and elastic infrastructure to carry intelligent service engines, enabling intelligent interaction and providing ultra-personalised services for various scenarios in the financial industry, thus accelerating its digital transformation.
In addition, Huawei, in collaboration with its partners, has developed a financial data solution that provides strong digital and AI foundations through the end-to-end resilient artificial intelligence data centre infrastructure, helping strengthen South Africa’s financial services industry.
Luke Wang, president of Huawei Insurance Business Unit, released the digital and intelligent insurance solution, highlighting three trends reshaping the insurance industry.
“Three shifts are reshaping the future of global insurance: the pre-incident prevention of business models, the personalisation of customer experiences, and scenario-based marketing,” says Wang.
“Huawei has released its digital and intelligent insurance solution, working with partners to support the sector’s digital and intelligent transformation of the insurance industry from four key aspects.
“[These are] modernisation of core insurance systems, intelligent upgrade of insurance, insurance cloud upgrades, and insurance resilient infrastructure,” he says.
The summit also featured insights from South Africa’s financial services sector. Senior leaders from major banks, along with other clients and partners, shared rich experiences and successful practices in the digital and intelligent transformation of South Africa’s financial services industry.
Looking ahead, Huawei will continue working closely with its customers and partners, providing advanced ICT infrastructure and customised solutions. Jointly they will build a thriving ecosystem, and usher in a new chapter of digital and intelligent transformation in South Africa’s financial industry.
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This article was sponsored by Huawei Connect.
