How China’s Huawei is trying to woo LatAm banks

Strong in the networks segment and growing its cloud deals for Latin American companies, China’s Huawei is now trying to leverage its cloud penetration in the regional financial sector.

Worldwide, Huawei claims to serve more than 3,600 financial customers, including 53 of the top 100 global banks.

But the sector is still not particularly strong for the company in Latin America, according to Marcelo Cavalcante de Oliveira Lima, Huawei’s chief digital transformation officer (CTDO) for the region.

“Huawei has done well in the financial market in general. It works with the four major banks in Brazil. Everyone has some Huawei service. Storage, for example, is very strong, telecom too. On the cloud side, we've started some works,” Lima told BNamericas.

Lima was hired around eight months ago, with one of his main missions being to grow the company's participation in the Latin American financial sector.

The executive came from Banco do Brasil, the largest public bank in Brazil. Of the 35 years he worked at the bank, 32 were spent in the technology area. His last role at the lender was VP of technology.

From a more strategic standpoint, Huawei wants to go beyond incumbent and large banks, targeting mid-sized, regional banks and even fintechs.

One of Huawei's bets for the segment is GaussDB, a distributed and scalable cloud database.

“GaussDB is a relational database distributed by Huawei Cloud. It is highly available, secure and scalable and offers services that include rapid deployment, backup, restore, monitoring and alarm reporting,” Airton Melo, business director at Huawei Enterprise in Brazil, said in a statement.

“As an open-source database, it has the capacity to implement all the features that other databases already use, but without lock-in, that is, whoever uses the solution doesn't have the system locked into the database,” added the executive.

The challenge is that few Latin American banks use Huawei Cloud. AWS, Microsoft and Oracle have dominated cloud contracts with big bank players.

Among its wins, Huawei is implementing a cloud contact center solution with Itaú, the largest private commercial bank in Latin America. Huawei's project with Itaú was announced last year. 

Itaú's main cloud partner is AWS, and the bank also works with Microsoft. 

Also in Brazil, Bradesco is carrying out proofs of concept with "some distributed database solutions," said Lima.

Recently, the executive was in talks with authorities and banks in Ecuador, including the country's central bank. In Mexico, Lima held talks with BBVA.

Chile is also seen as a market with opportunities, he said.

DATACENTER

In Brazil, Huawei leveraged its cloud structure with the activation of a third availability zone (datacenter cluster).

BNamericas previously reported on the zone, which was launched during the first quarter of the year. The new site is in São Paulo metropolitan region.

According to Huawei, the zone has caused latency drop to a very low 27 milliseconds for services in Brazil.

With the launch, Huawei Cloud reached 30 regions across the globe, with 85 availability zones and more than 2,800 content delivery network nodes.