The Norinchukin Bank Enables Scalability of Application Service Delivery Infrastructure for 18,000 JA Bank Liaison Officers

Start small and scale easily to support more applications

Overview

The Norinchukin Bank is one of the largest financial institutions in Japan that is responsible for various financial-related operations for organizations consisting of agricultural, fishery, and forestry cooperatives and companies. In recent years, it is also known as one of the largest hedge funds in Japan.

Together with Nutanix, the bank can now scale flexibly to match the changing business needs and launch customer applications and services faster than before.

Challenge

The Norinchukin Bank urgently needs to secure revenue from non-financial businesses due to shrinking global margins and break away from its dependence on community-based businesses in line with the rapid progress of digitalization.

Mitsuo Shibasaki, Senior Manager, IT & Systems Planning Div., Operations & IT Unit, The Norinchukin Bank, believes that “the banking industry will undergo continuous changes over the next 10 years that will be unprecedented and unprecedented.

Against this background, the bank used to develop an operational infrastructure using tablet devices for supporting onsite customer liaison activities. This infrastructure consists of two parts: a large-scale closed network that can be used by approximately 18,000 liaison officers nationwide at the same time, and a medium-scale infrastructure for Internet access to enable Web browsing for mutual fund and other proposal activities.

Previously to the development of this infrastructure, there was no unified office workflow or device terminal for liaison officers who were active in all 47 prefectures in Japan. Because their activities varied greatly from region to region, at the time of the launch of this initiative, the bank did not even have a clear idea of the number of prefectures participating in the project or the number of terminals to be used. Hence, it was crucial to select a solution that can flexibly respond to this challenge.

Solution

Since time is required for application development work, the bank decided to get started on the infrastructure project. The plan is to start small and expand the system to accommodate details and requirements which will crystalize later, such as the number of units and timing. In addition, there was a need to install additional Internet-capable applications on tablet devices to support customer offerings after the system was up and running, so the bank decided to expand the infrastructure in three phases based on the expected increase in the number of devices used by liaison officers.

From this perspective, The Norinchukin Bank decided to adopt the Nutanix Cloud Platform as the medium-scale infrastructure for Internet access for tablet devices used by liaison officers, taking into consideration not only the ease of expansion as the number of units used increases, but also the ease of expansion through the deployment of additional applications and the proven success of domestic financial institutions.

Kazuhiro Ishida, Senior Manager, JASTEM Systems Engineering Div.2, Nochu Information System Co., Ltd., said, “We also use the Nutanix Technical Account Management (TAM) service, and they not only promptly respond to questions that arise during daily operations, but also provide daily support with a thorough understanding of our system through regular bi-monthly meetings.”

Customer Outcome

Shibasaki explains why The Norinchukin Bank chose Nutanix and its benefits: “The reason we chose Nutanix was the ease of expansion. Nutanix allowed us to start small and easily expand our Internet access infrastructure in stages without loss as the number of prefectures using tablet devices and the number of liaison officers increased”.

“We are in a highly uncertain environment with rapidly changing business needs. Even after the system was up and running, our foundation platform needs to be able to scale to add more applications. Hence, we were amazed at the flexibility and speed with how Nutanix augmented our systems. When we started using the system in 2019, we had only one application for web browsing, but within two and a half to three years we were able to increase the number of applications to six, including investment trusts and fund wraps, easily enhancing our services,” Ishida said.

In the past, the bank struggled with inconsistencies in the environment, such as not being able to connect unless the server side was also changed when the storage firmware was upgraded. Now that the bank is using Nutanix, it only needed to upgrade the AOS version every year, and everything is upgraded centrally, so there are no compatibility issues between systems.

“During these three years of using Nutanix, the bank experienced ease of deployment and scalability, and also its extremely high stability in providing business continuity when compared to legacy systems. This stability provided a significant impact on man-hour savings from daily workflows and maintenance after the system is up and running,” adds Ishida.

Next Steps

The Nutanix-based tablet device infrastructure for liaison officers has been in operation for almost four years, and the bank plans to renew as it nears its end of lifecycle. Shibasaki explains his future plans, “Now that we fully understand that Nutanix allows us to achieve both flexible scalability and stable operation, we plan to adopt Nutanix for both infrastructures for tablet devices used by our liaison officers, including not only a medium-scale infrastructure for Internet access, but also a large-scale infrastructure for closed networks.”