Every financial institution is looking to digital transformation to meet rising customer expectations for speed and convenience, lower its operating cost, and fend off competition, including from tech companies moving into financial services. Some are spending over 10% of yearly revenue on technology investments, according to Bloomberg. "This is a huge investment and most financial institutions cannot support this for the long term," says Michael Fei, SME banking CEO at OneConnect Financial Technology, an associate of Ping An Insurance. The covid-19 pandemic has revealed how even financial institutions that considered themselves digitally advanced are, in reality, still wedded to analog processes along the chain of processing. "For many financial institutions, this has been a wake-up call," says Fei. "In the past, many had thought that if they have an online portal and a mobile application then that's enough. But now they've realized it's not. Some banks have online portals and mobile apps where you can apply for loans, but they still need to send items to the customer and carry out on-site inspection before they can process the loans, which hasn't been possible during covid. Banks have had to reshape and redesign the whole process of their lending products."

OneConnect, a leading technology-as-a-service platform serving financial institutions in China, is pleased to announce that its artificial intelligence research institute, Gamma Lab, won the FinTech Team of the Year award for its strong technical prowess, wide range of deployment scenarios across the financial sector and high-speed growth at The Asset Triple A Digital Awards 2020 held by international authoritative media The Asset. The Gamma O platform was awarded the Best Digital Financial Project for its success since launch in providing one-stop solutions that empowered financial institutions and technology service providers in connecting with each other. The Asset was founded in 1999, with its Triple A awards gaining a high level of influence and authority in Asian and international financial markets. For two consecutive years, Gamma Lab won the FinTech Team of the Year award, demonstrating OneConnect's industry leading position in both AI technology R&D and deployment. OneConnect's information extraction technology led at the international AI competition SemEval 2020, representing another world first for Gamma Lab in new AI technologies beyond the successes that the institute had achieved in terms of performance in the areas of microexpression recognition, facial action unit recognition, machine reading comprehension, natural language generation, emotion recognition and deep learning model inference.

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) is today (Friday) pleased to announce that it has entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China Limited (Ping An) to explore possible areas of cooperation and collaboration in Fintech and data analytics to enhance the region's financial market ecosystem. HKEX Chief Executive, Charles Li, joined Ping An Chairman, Ma Mingzhe, in Shenzhen to mark the signing of the MOU. In attendance were other senior executives from HKEX and Ping An. HKEX and Ping An will work together to identify areas of collaboration, including Fintech solutions across different asset classes, as well as the application of data and Artificial Intelligence technology to support the mutual connectivity of the Mainland Chinese, Hong Kong and international markets. Ping An, which is a leading financial services provider in insurance, banking, and securities in China, has significant technology capabilities and is a provider of Fintech solutions to support other financial institutions on their digital transformation.