Alibaba introduces cloud-computing service for banks

A banner shows the logo of Alibaba Group.[File photo / Provided to China Daily]

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, the Chinese e-commerce giant, introduced a cloud-computing service on Wednesday that is specially designed to help financial institutions cope with business in the Internet era.

The service, named Jubaopen- which means treasure-gathering bowl - allows financial institutions, such as banks, to save IT costs and boost efficiency when processing large amounts of data, the company said.

By offering safe and convenient cloud computing services to financial institutions, the company aims to bring the development of e-commerce to the next level, said Chen Jinpei, a manager of Aliyun, the could-computing arm of Alibaba.

Chen said many financial institutions actually suffer from processing the huge amount of online transactions in a short period of time.

For example, Taobao and Tmall, Alibaba's two main platforms, topped 35 billion yuan ($5.7 billion) in sales over 24 hours on Nov 11, a key shopping date.

"Using traditional technology to process the large volume of transactions is time-consuming and expensive. That's why we came up with this idea for a tailor-made cloud-computing service for financial institutions about a year ago," Chen said.

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