Cathay Financial Holdings: Offering a one-stop digital financial service platform with Apigee
About Cathay Financial Holdings
Founded in 2001, Cathay Financial Holdings is a leading Taiwanese finance holding company with subsidiaries offering insurance, banking and investment services to more than 14.5 million customers. In July 2021, Cathay Financial Holdings launched CaaS (Cathay as a Service), which is a one-stop platform providing digital financial services designed for various industries from healthcare, retail to transportation.
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Contact usCathay Financial Holdings builds a one-stop digital financial service platform that aggregates API products provided by its subsidiaries, leveraging Apigee to standardize API management while complying with information security regulations.
Google Cloud results
- Supports a one-stop platform offering digital financial services for various industries with Apigee
- Enables information security compliance for different financial services through Apigee
- Swiftly handles traffic surge with GKE and Cloud Monitoring
Standardizes API management across all subsidiaries
In this era of digital transformation, organizations across industries are leveraging the capabilities of digital financial solutions such as online payment and lending systems to improve their services. Ironically, despite the growing demand, many Taiwanese financial service providers still rely heavily on paper documents and face-to-face meetings to sell their products, making the application for digital financial services a tedious process.
Cathay Financial Holdings is dedicated to solving this issue. As one of the leading finance holding companies in Taiwan, Cathay Financial Holdings owns six subsidiaries that jointly provide a wide range of digital financial services from banking and insurance to investment, serving more than 14.5 million customers. In the past, Cathay Financial Holdings’ clients needed to consult different subsidiaries if they wanted to apply for multiple services, as each subsidiary operated independently. However, in 2021, Cathay Financial Holdings moved all of its financial services online onto a single platform.
“We wanted to create a one-stop solution across all the digital financial services we offer,” explains Alpha Chen, CaaS product owner at Cathay Financial Holdings. “It’s like an online marketplace where users can browse through the products, get in touch with the contact person, go through the application process and access the service they have purchased.” In search of the right solutions for its business, the organization decided to turn to Google Cloud.
Since all Cathay Financial Holdings’ digital financial services are provided through an application programming interface (API), and the current Taiwanese regulations require the company’s financial services subsidiaries to deploy their digital products on-prem, it needed an API management tool that supports a swift switch between different infrastructure settings as the backbone of its service platform. The Cathay Financial Holdings team found Apigee to be the best fit because of its high scalability, easy-to-use nature, and most importantly, the ability for it to be used in a public cloud, hybrid cloud and on-prem architecture.
"We want our new service platform to stay cloud ready, so that we can easily migrate from hybrid cloud to a public cloud environment when the regulations change," says Alex Moor, enterprise architect at the digital development department at Cathay Holding. "Apigee is an API management tool that offers this flexibility."
"We want our new service platform to stay cloud ready so that we can easily migrate from hybrid cloud to a public cloud environment when the regulations change. Apigee is an API management tool that offers this flexibility."
—Alex Moor, Enterprise Architect, Digital Development Department, Cathay Financial HoldingsA one-stop digital service platform supported by Apigee
Cathay Financial Holdings is among the first companies to deploy Apigee in Taiwan. To ensure that the adoption process went smoothly, the Google Cloud team held several workshops for Cathay Financial Holdings’ IT team. They also helped Cathay Financial Holdings design the structure of its API management system according to its needs and in compliance with local regulations, and mapped out the different responsibilities and designations. The strong technical support, coupled with the intuitive Apigee platform resulted in a successful deployment within just a few months. Cathay Financial Holdings launched its digital financial service platform CaaS (Cathay as a Service) in July 2021.
"On Apigee, we can complete all the settings on one interface, which has accelerated our development process," notes Moor. "The assistance and advice provided by the Google Cloud team also helped design a structure that allows us to manage our APIs in a more efficient way."
Currently, service products offered by Cathay Financial Holdings’ subsidiaries are available on the CaaS platform, targeting various industries from healthcare, retail to transportation. According to Chen, the CaaS platform not only provides Cathay Financial Holdings’ customers with faster services, but also helps significantly reduce the company’s operational costs.
Ensuring information security while complying with industry regulations
Apigee also helps Cathay Financial Holdings guarantee information security, a key priority in the finance industry. With security features like API access control and the ability to guard against malicious content and mask sensitive encrypted data, Cathay Financial Holdings is able to safeguard data security on the CaaS platform for its customers.
"We’re the first finance company that adopts Apigee in Taiwan. By implementing a management tool that supports both hybrid cloud and on-prem environments, we created virtually isolated environments for our subsidiaries to comply with the information security requirements for financial institutions and facilitate business integration," explains Henry Lin, assistant architect at the digital development department at Cathay Financial Holdings.
"We’re the first finance company that adopts Apigee in Taiwan. By implementing a management tool that supports both hybrid cloud and on-prem environments, we created virtually isolated environments for our subsidiaries to comply with the information security requirements for financial institutions and facilitate business integration."
—Henry Lin, Assistant Architect, Digital Development Department, Cathay Financial HoldingsA highly scalable infrastructure that supports swift troubleshooting
Cathay Financial Holdings uses Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to automate the deployment and management of the Kubernetes clusters of the CaaS platform, as well as the allocation of computing resources. Henry Lin says that the auto-scaling feature of GKE allows the Cathay Financial Holdings team to swiftly handle any instant flow surge.
The holding company also ensures high service quality through quick troubleshooting. Cloud Logging enables its engineers to easily trace log files when errors occur to identify the cause. On top of that, both Cloud Monitoring and Apigee send error alerts automatically and instantly, allowing Cathay Financial Holdings’ engineers to debug in the shortest time possible.
"Google Cloud has helped us realize a powerful platform to offer one-stop online services and manage our diverse products in a centralized manner," says Chen. "Now, we have a solid foundation to continue expanding and optimizing our fintech services and deliver all the benefits of digital transformation to our customers."
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About Cathay Financial Holdings
Founded in 2001, Cathay Financial Holdings is a leading Taiwanese finance holding company with subsidiaries offering insurance, banking and investment services to more than 14.5 million customers. In July 2021, Cathay Financial Holdings launched CaaS (Cathay as a Service), which is a one-stop platform providing digital financial services designed for various industries from healthcare, retail to transportation.