Huawei’s Roger Wang Says AI in Finance Needs the Right Ecosystem to Scale
Artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in financial services, but according to Huawei, widespread adoption does not automatically translate into enterprise-wide impact. In a recent discussion, Roger Wang, Director of Partner Development at Huawei’s Digital Finance BU, said the key to scalable AI in banking lies not only in technology, but in the ecosystem built around it.
Wang pointed to the gap between AI experimentation and full workflow integration, noting that many organisations have deployed AI tools without deeply embedding them into core business processes. He argued that this limits the technology’s ability to deliver meaningful value at scale and can even amplify existing inefficiencies if the systems are built on weak data or flawed assumptions.
To address that challenge, Huawei has developed the Huawei RONGHAI Financial Partner Program, which it says is designed to connect foundational infrastructure with specialised financial applications. The program has grown to include more than 150 partners globally, and Huawei positions it as a way to shorten transformation timelines for financial institutions while improving execution quality.
Wang said the company realised that digital transformation could not be delivered effectively through a traditional vendor-client model alone. Instead, he said Huawei needed to build an ecosystem of technology partners capable of supporting end-to-end capabilities across the transformation journey.
He added that speed has become essential in financial services, where banks can no longer afford multi-year technology modernisation cycles. As an example, Wang said Huawei helped complete a banking transformation project in the Philippines in less than 10 months. That experience, he said, reinforced the idea that core banking is only one part of broader digital transformation.
Wizard He, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Netis Technologies, also discussed the value of the partnership model. He said Netis works with Huawei to provide AI visibility and application-layer capabilities for banks, helping institutions move faster without sacrificing stability. According to He, the model allows partners to combine their strengths rather than working in isolation.
He cited a digital transformation project in Singapore, where a major bank launched an initiative known as “Gandalf” to learn from digital-native companies and apply that agility in a regulated banking environment. He said Huawei provided the underlying technology foundation while Netis focused on flexibility at the application layer.
Huawei said its partner ecosystem is curated carefully. Wang explained that partners are evaluated based on creativity in technology and use cases, speed of product development, and readiness to deploy on Huawei’s platform. These criteria are intended to ensure that the ecosystem remains coherent and capable of supporting large-scale deployment across markets.
Huawei says the RONGHAI program is aimed at turning collaboration into a structured model for delivering stable and scalable AI-infused financial solutions. By bringing together infrastructure, cloud, storage, computing and specialised software partners, the company is betting that banking transformation will increasingly depend on ecosystem design rather than standalone technology offerings.
Industry Analysis
The discussion highlights a growing shift in financial technology: AI success is increasingly determined by integration, governance and partner alignment, not just model performance. For banks, this suggests that scalable adoption will likely depend on ecosystems that combine infrastructure reliability with domain-specific application expertise.
Huawei’s approach also reflects broader industry pressure to accelerate transformation while managing operational risk. As financial institutions face faster market change and rising customer expectations, curated partner networks may become a more practical route to deploying AI in production environments.
