BEIJING, July 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — WeBank, China’s first digital bank and one of the world’s leading digital banks, has been named "Best AI-Driven Bank of the Year in Asia Pacific for 2026" at the 2026 TAB Global AI Excellence Awards China Ceremony hosted by The Asian Banker in Beijing.
WeBank Wins The Asian Banker’s Best AI-Driven Bank of the Year Award in Asia Pacific
The award is part of The Asian Banker’s inaugural Global AI Excellence Awards, recognizing institutions that have embedded AI into the core of their businesses to transform customer experience, product innovation, operations and governance. WeBank became the first institution to receive the "Best AI-Driven Bank of the Year in Asia Pacific" award.
In presenting the award, The Asian Banker highlighted WeBank’s AI-native approach to banking, enabled by its AI Engineering Platform, which supports the deep integration of AI into core business scenarios at scale and provides a new benchmark for financial institutions seeking to leverage AI to drive sustainable growth and operational efficiency.
WeBank has maintained a long-standing commitment to AI innovation. Prior to the generative AI boom, the bank had already applied predictive AI across key scenarios including identity verification, risk assessment and customer interaction. With the rise of generative AI, WeBank unveiled its AI-native banking strategy, transforming AI from an assistive tool into a foundational capability for business transformation, operational improvement and organizational evolution.
Building AI Infrastructure to Scale Enterprise-wide Adoption
Scaling AI adoption requires robust infrastructure. Centered around computing resources, advanced models and an ecosystem of reusable AI tools and Skills, WeBank has built an AI Engineering Platform designed to make AI capabilities accessible across the organization.
The platform combines cost-effective, elastic computing resources, continuous integration and adaptation of advanced models, as well as low-code development tools, knowledge bases, an MCP plugin marketplace and reusable Skills for building AI agents.
According to WeBank, the platform currently handles more than 20 billion tokens per day, while new models can be integrated and deployed into production in as little as one day.
Redesigning Banking Around AI
As AI becomes increasingly accessible across the organization, WeBank is advancing AI adoption along two main paths: embedding vertical AI applications into core business workflows, and developing digital employees to perform specific tasks through human-AI collaboration.
Through vertical AI applications, WeBank is exploring the end-to-end redesign of business processes.
Eason Wang, Chief AI Architect of WeBank, noted that AI-native banking is not simply about adding AI to existing workflows; it requires redesigning processes around AI as a foundational execution layer. "We are shifting from human-led execution with AI assistance to AI-led execution, where humans define objectives, set boundaries and provide oversight."
Today, WeBank has implemented more than 100 AI applications across multiple business domains. For example, in certain credit assessment, AI analyzes business operations, financial information and industry trends to automatically generate decision-support reports, reducing the approval cycle from days to hours and delivering a 10x improvement in efficiency. In AI-driven customer acquisition, AI enables automated batch generation of compliant advertising visuals and has contributed to reducing customer acquisition costs for first-time loan applications by more than 20%.
Digital Employees: AI Teammates for the Future of Work
At WeBank, digital employees are introduced as "digital teammates" within the organization, appearing alongside human employees in the enterprise directory and capable of performing assigned roles and responsibilities. Similar to human employees, they go through onboarding and performance reviews.
More than 80 digital employees are now operating across WeBank, supporting functions including operations, risk management, customer service, knowledge management and technology.
For example, an anti-fraud digital employee can access multiple systems, integrate diverse sources of information and assist with case investigation, reducing processing time per case from three days to five minutes. An IT operations digital employee can autonomously diagnose and resolve system issues, with more than 10,000 subsystem versions already released through its work. An R&D digital employee supports the software development lifecycle, including security ticket handling, code development, testing and release management.
These digital employees represent WeBank’s exploration of new ways of working, where humans and AI collaborate to enhance organizational productivity.
Advancing Sustainable Financial Inclusion Through AI
For WeBank, the ultimate value of technological advancement lies in enabling more sustainable models for financial inclusion.
"Whether through end-to-end process redesign or the introduction of digital employees as a new form of digital workforce, WeBank is exploring a next-generation operating model built on meaningful human-AI collaboration," said Eason Wang. "By leveraging AI to drive the evolution of digital finance, we aim to enhance service efficiency and provide more precise, efficient and sustainable support for inclusive finance."
About WeBank
WeBank Co., Ltd. ("WeBank") is one of the world’s leading digital banks. Launched in 2014, WeBank adheres to the mission "Better Banking for All". WeBank has provided inclusive financial services to over 440 million individual customers and over 7.6 million MSMEs. WeBank is the first Chinese bank to build a fully controllable distributed core system that supports 1.4 billion daily transactions at its peak, with product availability exceeding 99.999% and single-account IT operation and maintenance cost reduced to RMB 1.9. WeBank has filed more than 4,200 patent applications in total and contributed to the publication of over 90 international, national, and industry standards.
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