The financial industry stands at a critical juncture. The shift from “doing digital” to “doing AI” is no longer an abstract future but a present-day imperative. Yet, despite the excitement and countless pilot projects, a stark reality persists: most AI experiments—from sophisticated chatbots and credit engines to advanced fraud tools—never scale to become foundational parts of the bank’s operational platform. Research suggests that only a small minority of banks have Generative AI fully live in production.
This is the central challenge that Huawei’s FinAgent Booster (FAB) is designed to solve. As Jason Cao, CEO of Huawei Digital Finance BU, explains, the gap isn’t about the quality of the AI model; it’s about the sheer complexity of the engineering required to make that AI “stick” within the bank’s existing architecture. FAB, in essence, is a powerful accelerant that bottles up years of hard-won engineering expertise and deploys it as a ready-to-use solution.
The Unseen Barrier: Legacy Systems and Engineering Overload
Banks are not greenfield start-ups. They are highly regulated institutions built on decades of complex, proprietary, and often siloed systems. When a new AI agent—a sophisticated, context-aware piece of software that can proactively take action—is developed, the biggest hurdle is not the algorithm itself, but forcing it to play nicely with the entire digital ecosystem.
“We have a lot of legacy applications, but banks are also building new AI-native applications,” Cao notes. “For the AI-native ones, it’s faster, but you still have to connect with legacy. That connection is what slows everything down.”
This complexity leads to a paralysis of implementation. Projects get stuck in integration testing, never achieving the stability, performance, and compliance necessary for a global rollout. For mid-sized banks, which lack the massive budgets and specialized teams of the largest players, this barrier is often insurmountable. They know they must modernise to compete, but the effort to build every AI application and integration from scratch is simply too great.
FAB’s Three Pillars: Easy, Ready, and Smooth to Use
Huawei’s FinAgent Booster directly tackles this engineering challenge by providing a modular, pre-engineered environment for AI agent deployment. The solution is built around three core promises that simplify the entire lifecycle: Easy to use, Ready to use, and Smooth to use.
- Ready to Use: Pre-Built Workflows and Scenarios
Instead of facing a blank slate, FAB gives banks a running start. It comes pre-loaded with over 50 innovative scenario workflows and demos drawn directly from best practices in banking, insurance, and securities across the globe.
Imagine a bank that wants to deploy an AI agent to fully automate its small-business loan pre-approval process. With FAB, they don’t have to spend months charting the optimal workflow for data intake, risk scoring, and communication. The workflow is already templated, complete with logical steps derived from successful real-world implementations.
As Cao puts it, “If one person has already tested many ways and found the best workflow for, say, a loan process, the next bank doesn’t need to repeat all that work.” This knowledge-sharing is critical for accelerating the pace of transformation.
- Easy to Use: The Power of Micro-Component Plug-ins (MCPs)
The ability to connect a new AI agent to an old core system is the ultimate test of an integration platform. FAB solves this with Micro-Component Plug-ins (MCPs). These are modular connectors that allow an AI agent to interact with both new, AI-native applications and entrenched legacy platforms.
Huawei has accumulated over 150 financial MCPs covering common processes across different financial sectors. These plug-ins streamline what is traditionally the most complex and risky part of deployment. An AI agent, rather than needing custom code to interface with a 20-year-old system, simply uses the appropriate MCP. This accelerates adoption globally, as FAB is designed to help institutions move faster across different regulatory and system maturity landscapes without needing to rebuild their core infrastructure for every new environment.
- Smooth to Use: Operational Resilience and Performance
An AI platform is only as good as its performance in the real world. FAB is engineered for the rigors of financial services. It combines Huawei’s next-generation intelligent computing with its advanced ModelArts Versatile agent platform to refine the engineering process and guarantee stability.
This focus on operational performance means the difference between an AI service that frustrates customers and one that delights them. For instance, Huawei reports that its customer-facing agents can achieve over 90% accuracy in intent recognition while delivering responses in millisecond-level latency. In the modern financial world, where service has to be “always on” and “zero wait,” this resilience and speed are non-negotiable competitive advantages.
Speed as the Ultimate Differentiator
Jason Cao’s message is clear: the race to become an “AI Bank” is a marathon, but one where speed of iteration is the key to winning. He cautions against a pursuit of theoretical perfection, which can cause banks to waste years chasing an ideal blueprint instead of gaining practical experience.
“The work with AI doesn’t have a proven way,” Cao explains. “There’s not a clearly defined path, so people are exploring. In this case, speed is very, very important—even if you make mistakes, it’s better to make them earlier.”
This mindset underpins the entire FinAgent Booster philosophy. By providing the tools and pre-tested blueprints, Huawei allows banks to dedicate their energy to learning and refining their AI agents in high-value scenarios like hyper-personalization, rather than spending their time on foundational engineering.
AI is poised to transform banking from a transactional service portal into a proactive financial steward. It will shift the industry from a focus on the top 20% of high-net-worth clients to offering premium, hyper-personalised attention to the “long tail” of every customer. The banks that move quickly to leverage agentic AI will be the ones that define this new era. FinAgent Booster is designed to be the engine that helps them make that vital, immediate leap from promising pilots to indispensable, everyday platforms.
