Modernizing Core Banking with Autonomous AI Agents

Huawei is introducing its agentic banking framework to help financial institutions achieve true hyper-personalization and accelerate legacy system modernization. According to Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Digital Finance Business Unit, this represents a significant shift where AI evolves from a basic tool into an active colleague capable of restructuring entire banking architectures.

“In the past, banks relied heavily on the 80/20 rule,” Cao explained in an interview with The Fintech Times. “When agentic AI arrives with its strong capabilities, everyone could be treated as a VIP customer.” This means extending personalized services beyond high-value customers to the entire user base.

The framework comprises three key layers:

1. Customer Experience Layer: Transitioning from graphical interfaces to language-based interactions powered by intent recognition and long-term memory—allowing AI to understand years of customer history instantly.
2. Collaboration Layer: Enabling seamless human-AI teamwork where specialized agents automatically handle complex workflows, removing friction from standard banking processes.
3. Decision Model Layer: Moving beyond rules-based systems to utilize unstructured data (documents, images) and transform expert knowledge into digital models.

Huawei recognizes that modernization requires navigating legacy platforms alongside new cloud and AI solutions. The company focuses on accelerating this transition by using AI to automate code conversion (e.g., COBOL to Java), drawing on experience from successful migrations in mainland China where hundreds of millions of users were moved with zero service interruption.

Early implementations across Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East are showing promise—with one Thai bank reducing fraud resolution times exponentially using AI agents, and institutions in the Middle East automating document review processes for improved efficiency.