SHANGHAI, Jan. 20, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — OneConnect Financial Technology Co., Ltd. (NYSE: OCFT) ("OneConnect"), a leading technology-as-a-service platform for financial institutions, has been awarded the 2021 Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Progress Award (Enterprise Technology Innovation Project) for its next-generation Artificial Intelligence Open Innovation Platform for Inclusive Finance.
Released every year by the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Wu Wenjun AI Science and Technology Progress Award is the highest accolade for intelligent science and technology in China. OneConnect is one of only five companies to receive the award in 2021, which cements its leadership position as an enterprise for AI innovation, R&D, application and ecosystem development in China’s financial services industry, while also reinforcing the industry’s support for OneConnect.
OneConnect’s open innovation platform was first launched in 2019 after its parent company, Ping An Group, became the only integrated financial enterprise approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) to build an inclusive finance platform. Designed to tackle underlying issues of low efficiency and a lack of innovation in the banking and finance industry, an open platform for inclusive finance enables the delivery of comprehensive and effective services for all social groups and demographics. By harnessing cutting-edge technologies such as AI, FinTech organizations can help expand the breadth and depth of financial services and management offered, provide better solutions for insufficient or unbalanced supply, address challenges with risk control for financial institutions, and lower operating costs for lenders.
OneConnect’s platform combines the company’s extensive experience in AI R&D and applications with Ping An Group’s core AI technology engines, products and solutions, as well as the R&D forces of leading higher education institutions, such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University. Making full use of AI, the open innovation platform accelerates breakthrough technologies that integrate AI and financial services, forms a convenient platform for the sharing and transformation of core AI technologies, and promotes the industrial upgrade and ecosystem development for inclusive finance.
With its open platform, OneConnect has tackled key technical bottlenecks that are unique to financial services, such as smart identification and data processing. Providers can access core AI technologies with independent IP rights, API libraries, and AI templates for various financial service functions, configurations, and business types, which in turn enable the creation of end-to-end solutions for typical application scenarios for financial inclusion.
At present, OneConnect has completed the foundational designs for the platform; formulated and improved the annotation specifications for videos, texts, pictures and voices in the financial services sector; and commenced the construction of a multi-modal financial data set. The platform also features hundreds of APIs that provide partners with basic technical processing capabilities, such as image recognition, speech recognition, and natural language processing, as well as AI application solutions based on multiple financial scenarios such as risk control, marketing, and operations.
Since its inception, OneConnect has continuously invested in technology R&D. As of December 31, 2021, the company has submitted 5,652 global patent applications, of which 1,525 are overseas patent applications. The technology used within OneConnect’s AI Open Innovation Platform for Inclusive Finance has also garnered multiple awards and taken out first place in numerous international data processing challenges, including the OMG-Emotion challenge at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks hosted by the University of Hamburg; Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) challenge; Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) for reading comprehension; Stanford DAWN Deep Learning Benchmark (DAWNBench); 14th Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval2020); and the international DSTC7 natural language generation workshop.
