MUCFC

Need for a reliable platform

Implement a platform for big data analysis.

Innovative finance needs the support of big data analysis and that’s what is delivered by The Merchants-Unicom Consumer Finance Company (MUCFC) which is a joint venture between China Merchants Bank Hong Kong subsidiary Wing Lung Bank and China Unicom. With a registered capital of two billion yuan, MUCFC uses the concept of micro-finances and new interconnectivity as the basis for its developments in the internet era.

The increasing interconnectivity of devices requires new rules to be understood and new partners to be found. New technology needs to be used and new models must be sought. Systems must be created for credit-staging, financing, mobile payment, and other products to create a new consumer financial experience and to continually increase core competitiveness.

MUCFC is focused on providing financial services to online clients so building a big data analysis platform has become the top priority. The organization hoped that, through the integration of financial and telecoms data, it would be able to carry out real-time analysis and evaluation of customer’s credit and risk. In this way, it would gradually form a user portrait based on the user’s asset changes, consumption habits, social networking and other information. This would not only allow the control of financial risks, it would also help MUCFC to explore new business models and improve the accuracy of financial services.

MUCFC encountered a lot of challenges in its construction of a big data analysis platform. First was how to ensure the security and availability of financial services. MUCFC’s big data analysis platform supports huge volumes of financial data and the failure of an important node could lead to system downtime or even data loss. That could lead to business stagnation and other systemic risks, bringing incalculable losses. MUCFC needed to ensure the security of the financial data so that a user’s error query would not lead to the paralysis of the system and so that, even if some nodes were damaged, the overall availability of the business platform would be protected.

Secondly, the performance of the big data analysis platform is critical to the financial sector.

“There is never enough time for data analysis, as the longer the data analysis takes, the lower the value, especially for financial services. Quickly completing data analysis means that we can respond to user needs as soon as possible, reducing business waiting times and bringing about great innovation,” says MUCFC financial research and development director, Jiang Lianglei. “MUCFC has now accumulated more than 10,000 credit customers so huge amounts of data need to be analyzed by a node in a short time. Only a high-performing data analysis platform can ensure the timely response to demand and enable business flexibility.”

With the rapid development of startups, MUCFC is also very concerned about the future expansion of its big data analysis platform. Jiang stresses: “A platform that was not scalable would prevent business growth so would have to be replaced, creating significant IT costs and potentially causing business interruption. The impact on MUCFC would be huge.”

As a result, selecting a Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture for strong scalability was the first choice for MUCFC, to achieve big data analysis along with the potential for online and connectivity expansion. It hoped for future linear performance expansion.

Finally, MUCFC hoped to be able to simplify the operation and maintenance of the big data platform to reduce IT costs.

“We hoped that the big data platform would have standardized, automated management tools, as this would not only be conducive to fast big data analysis but would also increase system stability. In addition, we also wanted a platform that would fully integrate resources and tools available on the internet, making them easier to use,” adds Jiang.