AI’s been reshaping financial services for several years now. But as its digital adoption accelerates, one factor determines whether AI extracts value or adds complexity: choosing the right partners for specialised applications.

According to McKinsey, while AI tools are now widespread, most organisations have not embedded them deeply into their workflows, limiting their ability to generate impact at the enterprise level.

The right AI fit has the capability to unlock something powerful, like transforming financial systems into agile, high-performance engines that respond as instantly as a digital-native platform.

On the flip side, AI trained on flawed data and assumptions festers old problems, snowballing inefficiencies into systemic risk rather than eliminating them.

The real challenge, therefore, lies in the incentives behind AI, and the partnerships that shape how AI is designed, trained, and deployed across financial systems.

It is at this intersection that Huawei created the Huawei RONGHAI Financial Partner Program. Designed to bridge foundational infrastructure with specialised financial applications, the program has grown to more than 150 partners worldwide.

Roger Wang, the Director of the Partner Development Department at Huawei Digital Finance BU, and Wizard He, the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Netis Technologies, sat down with Fintech News Network’s Chief Editor, Vincent Fong, to unravel how the Huawei RONGHAI Financial Partner Program is enabling AI-infused finance applications that are innovative, stable, and scalable in production.

Cultivating the Power of Chemistry Through Partnerships

The traditional vendor-client relationship is evolving. Huawei is cultivating what Roger Wang, Director of Partner Development at Huawei’s Digital Finance BU, refers to as an ecosystem where value is created by the “chemistry” between its partners.

@fintechnewsnetwork

Huawei’s RongHai is a game changer for digital finance and AI @Huawei #fintech #AI #digitalfinance #fyp #Banking

♬ original sound – Fintech News Network – Fintech News Network

The idea of the RONGHAI program spawned from a hard reality check. Despite being a large company with substantial experience accumulated over the past decade, Roger shares that it was not enough to deliver digital transformation in its entirety. He explained,

“We came to realise that we need to build an ecosystem with a lot of excellent technology partners, so we can build end-to-end capabilities throughout the digital transformation journey that shortens the time and effort that our customers need to spend.”

That urgency is driven by how quickly financial services are changing. Traditionally, banks could afford to spend years modernising core systems.

That timeline no longer matches how fast customer behaviour, competition, and business models are evolving. From a CEO’s perspective, waiting for years is no longer acceptable nor feasible today.

Through close collaboration between Huawei and its technology partners, those timelines have been dramatically compressed. Roger shares,

“In the Philippines, we did a whole banking transformation in less than 10 months. This gave us the inspiration that core banking is just a corner of digital transformation, and we needed to build all of these capabilities. It gave us the idea to launch a new program (RONGHAI), attracting competent partners to work with us, and then supporting our customers in a different way.”

Why Specialised Partnerships Will Define the Future of Banking

For Wizard He, an AI expert with over two decades of experience under his belt, the value of the RONGHAI program lies in its ability to provide end-to-end solutions to banking customers. Netis, as a partner, does comprehensive AI visibility for banks.

Having worked with Huawei across multiple markets, Wizard describes RONGHAI as an operating model that allows banks to move faster without sacrificing stability.

One of Netis’ earliest engagements under this model began in Singapore. A leading bank embarked on a digital transformation initiative, codenamed “Gandalf”. The objective was to learn from digital-native technology leaders (think Google, Amazon, Netflix and the like) and translate that agility into a regulated banking environment.

In that journey, Wizard explained, Netis and Huawei collaborated closely to ensure there were no surprises. Huawei anchored the transformation with a stable technology foundation, while Netis focused on delivering agility at the application layer.

“Huawei also has a huge global expansion network. They connect to different continents and leverage this network as the owner and member of RONGHAI.”

Crucially, Wizard emphasised that the strength of the RONGHAI program lies in how specialised partners come together as a system rather than operating in silos.

In core banking projects, for example, Huawei works alongside core banking vendors and software partners to deliver transformation, agility and resilience, all at the same time.

“It’s like a triangle,” Wizard explained. “Huawei has different product portfolios. They have ICT infrastructures, computing, storage network, Huawei cloud and the GPU. So if you work with Huawei, problems, especially related to technology, can be solved.”

Huawei’s dedicated partner management model further accelerates this process, enabling partners to understand the strengths of all the technologies, deploy faster, and scale with confidence. Wizard shares his benefits as a partner to the program:

“We collaborated with Huawei and extended to five different continents, and shared our experience from one to many.”

How Huawei Curated 150+ High-Performance Partnerships

With more than 150 companies already onboard, the RONGHAI ecosystem is intentionally selective. Roger explains that what matters most is how well partners can contribute to a coherent and high-performing ecosystem.

As more partners come together, new synergies begin to emerge organically. Maintaining quality and consistency at scale, however, requires discipline. Entry into the program is therefore guided by three core criteria.

“We need to see how creative that partner is in terms of technology, applications and real use cases they create. The second (criterion) is about speed, on how quickly you can evolve your product based on a specific customer.”

The third criterion is platform readiness. Huawei remains deeply committed to its infrastructure layer, and partners must, in turn, be able to deploy their applications efficiently on that foundation.

By ensuring partners can land solutions quickly and scale them across markets, RONGHAI turns collaboration from a loose network into a governed ecosystem capable of delivering enterprise-grade AI adoption at scale.

Watch as Roger Wang and Wizard He talk about why scaling AI in finance requires curated partnerships, execution, and ecosystem design. Catch the full conversation on how the Huawei RONGHAI program is shaping the future of AI-infused finance below.

Featured image by Fintech News Singapore