China CITIC Bank International is a leading Hong Kong-based commercial bank that offers a broad spectrum of financial services spanning wealth management, personal banking, wholesale banking as well as global markets and treasury solutions. It aspires to be the best integrated financial services provider by providing value-creating financial solutions to its customers across the globe. Its flagship mobile banking platform "inMotion" provides a comprehensive suite of virtual financial services such as investing, lending, account opening, insurance, wealth management, and digital payments.

Customer-centricity is essential to banks while digitization has helped them to improve the end user experience. With more and more competitors providing seamless mobile banking experience, it was important for China CITIC Bank International to remain at the forefront of innovation by improving continuously its flagship mobile banking platform "inMotion". Outlined below are some the challenges encountered by China CITIC Bank International:

• Limited in-app functionalities: The new-age mobile banking ecosystem is reaching new heights, especially with super apps gaining rapid traction. China CITIC Bank International’s “inMotion” required a broad financial functionalities to keep up with the changing business landscape, increased customer demand and convert it into an all-encompassing high-performing super app for different banking requirements.

• Need for efficient migration support: China CITIC Bank International wanted to re-architect “inMotion” to integrate multiple app functionalities within one platform, improve R&D efficiency, boost cross-team collaboration, and enhance the overall user experience. The bank sought support from a reliable partner to migrate “inMotion” to a robust PaaS platform that could enable an iterative and incremental development approach, allowing different app functionalities within the app to be developed independently by a team.

• Lack of robust digital operations: To stand apart from the competitors, simplify app O&M, boost business growth, and meet changing customer demand, China CITIC Bank International wanted to inject innovative digital capabilities such as real-time data collection, user behavior analysis, intelligent advertising, and more within “inMotion”. It would provide China CITIC Bank International with more insights into user patterns and preferences to successfully serve their specific needs.

• Remote business complexities: Facilitating secure, convenient, remote, and online access to financial services for customers across different geographical locations was one of China CITIC Bank International’s primary priorities. It wanted to move beyond the everyday technical challenges such as slow response time, high latency, slow server performance, and security-related barriers associated with remote online banking services.

China CITIC Bank International was looking for a partner to efficiently modernize and integrate innovative financial capabilities within its flagship mobile banking platform "inMotion". It leveraged Alibaba Cloud’s financial-grade mobile development platform, mPaaS (Mobile Platform as a Service), to seamlessly serve the transformation needs of “inMotion”.

The flexible business app modularization and component-based development capabilities on mPaaS allowed China CITIC Bank International to easily incorporate different financial functionalities within the app. This accelerated product development, improved development efficiency, reduced R&D costs and boosted time-to-market. mPaaS also offered speedy, low-latency network transmission on “inMotion” to effectively help China CITIC Bank International manage high-concurrency and heavy traffic demand.

China CITIC Bank International leveraged a broad spectrum of capabilities on mPaaS to transform “inMotion” into a dynamic super app. Originating from the Alipay super app, mPaaS offers complete mobile app lifecycle management capabilities, including development, testing, release, marketing, analytics, and maintenance. With mPAAs, China CITIC Bank International can enhance its digital operations capability and make better business decisions through real-time analytics.

• Stable and simplified app development: The flexible unified development framework on mPaaS helped China CITIC Bank International with ease of development and improved R&D efficiency. By containerizing each business module, mPaaS minimized performance-related errors such as crashes and lags, making the app highly stable. It fostered agile development to achieve efficient business iteration, shortened release periods, and seamless cross-collaboration across different business units at China CITIC Bank International.

• Remote online banking services: Using the capabilities of mPaaS, China CITIC Bank International could create a virtual financial business hall to promote remote business sales. It provided varied remote banking services, including real-time electronic know-your-customer (eKYC), video-based bank teller, loan interview, live finance broadcasts, live video streaming, without any geographical constraints.

China CITIC Bank International successfully transformed its flagship mobile banking platform "inMotion" into a robust banking super app with numerous app functionalities using Alibaba Cloud’s mPaaS platform and rich financial industry experience. It simplified app development, enhanced customer satisfaction, and accelerated business growth and expansion.

As financial institutions continue to maintain the digital mobile banking momentum and uncover new innovative ways to boost customer satisfaction, China CITIC Bank International looks forward to collaborating with Alibaba Cloud. It aims to drive more digitized experiences for its customers, improve operational efficiency, and innovate at scale by leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s other technological innovations in the finance industry.