SHENZHEN, China, Nov. 24, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- WeBank wins the "Special Award for Digital Native Business" at the recent IDC Future Enterprise Awards 2023 ceremony held in Singapore for the project of Digital Bank WeBank Supporting the High-Quality Development of Digital Economy.

Hosted by the International Data Corporation (IDC), the IDC Future Enterprise Awards is in its seventh year this year. The Awards recognizes the best players in the Asia Pacific region and the substantial impact of their digital and technology-driven approaches amidst the era of the digital economy.

This award acknowledges WeBank's efforts in leveraging its strengths as a digital bank to engage and participate in the high-quality development of digital economy in China. With its leading digital technology capabilities, WeBank has been able to provide more micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) and the general public with equal access to inclusive financial services through specialized and differentiated financial products. Along with a series of inclusive finance products, including "Weilidai," the online and unsecured MSEMs loan service "Weiyedai," and "WeBank Wealth+", WeBank has served over 370 million individuals and more than 4.1 million MSMEs as of mid-2023, supporting the high-quality development of inclusive finance in China.

Since its establishment in 2014, WeBank has championed the role of technology in promoting inclusive finance, following its mission of "Better Banking for All." It has made significant financial and capacity investments in the research and development of leading-edge technologies, including artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, and big data. By tightly upholding leading technology and new factors of production, WeBank has strengthened the core capabilities of digital inclusive finance.

Starting from its inception, WeBank has successfully adopted fully distributed technologies to build the first distributed core banking system in China, namely Openhive. Openhive enables WeBank to be flexible and scalable to support over 1 billion daily peak transactions, and leads to affordable equipment and maintenance costs, without branch operation costs. Thus, WeBank is enabled to provide 24x7 seamless services 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 Openhive's feature of low cost, large scale, and high availability, WeBank has reached a balance between serving the long-tail customer base and, simultaneously, maintaining profitable. Thus, WeBank has successfully explored a new model to develop digital inclusive finance that is commercially sustainable.

In the future, WeBank will continue to integrate leading-edge technology and the unique strength of digital banking to innovate digital inclusive finance, further support the real economy, and open source its fintech capability to assist with digital transformation across industries. WeBank will also contribute its share to facilitating the high-quality development of China's economy by breaking the bottlenecks of the digital economy and enhancing the in-depth integration of the digital and real economy.

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 the Top 1000 World Banks by The Banker.

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 10% 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.