Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (Asia) Limited (ICBC Asia) serves as the overseas flagship of the ICBC Group, with a strategic positioning of “rooted in Hong Kong, connected to Mainland China, serving the Asia-Pacific region, and operating globally.”

Operating in one of the world’s most highly regulated financial markets, ICBC Asia places system resilience, data security, and service continuity at the core of its technology strategy. To better serve customers across the Greater Bay Area and prepare for extreme risk scenarios—such as large-scale infrastructure failures or regional disruptions—the bank initiated a distributed transformation to modernize its core infrastructure.

The objective was clear: evolve from a traditional primary–standby model to a true active-active architecture across cities, while meeting the highest regulatory and operational standards for the banking industry.

The Challenge: Legacy Primary-Standby Limitations

As business scale and regulatory requirements increased, ICBC Asia faced several structural challenges with its legacy architecture:

• Inability to Support Cross-City Active-Active Operations
  Traditional databases could not natively support strong consistency and real-time availability across geographically distributed data centers.
• Operational Risks under Extreme Failure Scenarios
  Manual failover in primary–standby setups introduced recovery uncertainty during node, site, or city-level failures.
• Performance and Scalability Constraints
  Growing transaction volumes and mixed workloads placed increasing pressure on monolithic systems.
• High Infrastructure and O&M costs
  Legacy IOE-based architectures resulted in high hardware, storage, and operational overhead.

To close the final gap in its distributed architecture, ICBC Asia needed a native distributed database that could deliver strong consistency, high availability, elastic scalability, and seamless migration.

The Solution: A Native Distributed Database for a Two-Cities, Three-Centers Architecture

After evaluating multiple mature database products through in-depth research and proof-of-concept testing, ICBC Asia selected OceanBase as the foundation of its distributed database architecture.

• Financial-Grade Distributed Design: OceanBase was deployed in a two-cities, three-centers, five-replica architecture spanning production sites in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, plus a dedicated disaster recovery site. A Paxos-based majority quorum guarantees strong consistency and high availability across all distributed nodes and zones.
• Automated Disaster Recovery: OceanBase’s multi-replica architecture natively absorbs faults at the node, zone, data center, and city levels—completely eliminating manual failovers. During fault-injection testing, shutting down an entire data center resulted in zero data loss and an RTO of under 30 seconds, ensuring 99.999% business continuity.
• Seamless Scalability & Compatibility: A single distributed engine now handles both OLTP and complex OLAP workloads, allowing ICBC Asia to scale nodes dynamically with automatic load balancing. Crucially, OceanBase’s high compatibility with Oracle and MySQL meant the bank could migrate critical applications with minimal code changes, slashing project timelines and migration risk.

The Results

By migrating to OceanBase, ICBC Asia achieved extreme data safety alongside massive operational efficiencies:

• 3–5x Performance Surge: Faster transaction processing delivered a noticeably smoother customer experience.
• 80% Storage Cost Reduction: High-compression storage engines and tenant consolidation drastically shrank the bank's data footprint.
• Fractional O&M Costs: By retiring legacy IOE hardware, operational and maintenance costs plummeted to just 1/10th of their previous levels.
• Regulatory Excellence: The new architecture fully complies with the highest disaster recovery standards mandated by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority.

Looking Ahead

With OceanBase as its distributed database foundation, ICBC Asia has successfully built a resilient, scalable, and future-ready banking platform.

The new architecture not only strengthens the bank’s ability to withstand extreme risk scenarios, but also lays the groundwork for the gradual migration of core customer-facing systems and large-scale analytical workloads. As ICBC Asia continues to advance its “technology-driven, value-creating” strategy, its distributed data architecture will remain a critical enabler of long-term innovation, regulatory compliance, and business growth.