What a regional broker must hold for itself

Kuranoe Information Systems processes our trades, positions, cash and customer statements overnight, alongside 22 other securities firms. We cannot change its code, and no contract will make it treat a firm of our size differently from its largest users. My work is to decide what we must hold ourselves. We keep our own copy of each day's executed orders and cash movements, which is how we knew which accounts to hold in November 2024. Each year we ask Kuranoe to return a full data extract in the agreed exit format and load it into an empty environment to prove we can read it. I take incident findings to the user council rather than negotiating alone, because a fix that helps 23 firms is more likely to be funded. I report this dependence to the board as a concentration risk, with its cost and alternatives.

Our incident decisions are now written rules agreed with sales and compliance before an event, rather than improvised at twenty to eight in the morning. Each rule states which orders we accept, which accounts we hold, what branch staff tell customers and who may override it. If positions are more than one business day out of date, for example, we accept orders only from accounts with no activity since the last good file. I report every material incident to the board by its customer consequence: orders delayed, accounts held, complaints received and any settlement affected. I also separate what the supplier must explain from what we must own. A customer in Uwajima does not care whose batch failed, and our report to the supervisor has to describe what we decided, not only what happened to us.

Many of our online customers are in their seventies and use the channel to check balances more often than to trade. That makes them attractive to phishing and slow to adopt new security steps. I prefer controls that remove the phishable step entirely, such as passkeys and hardware keys, to controls that ask customers to be more careful. When a control excludes some customers, I look for an alternative that is equally safe and fairly priced, never a weaker fallback; in 2025 that meant telephone ordering at online commission rates. I work with the contact centre on caller verification, because a stronger online sign-in simply moves fraudsters to the telephone if call-back procedures are loose. Withdrawals to a newly registered bank account carry a seven-day hold that sales staff cannot waive.

Closing seven branches between 2021 and 2023 required more than redirecting post. Advisers visiting customers at home carry tablets that show holdings, record suitability checks and route the additional approval our policy requires before complex products are sold to customers over seventy-five. Two former branch towns have video consultation booths in community centres, and others use rooms in our allied banks' branches. The inheritance case system, live since 2023, lets heirs in Osaka or Tokyo send documents by post or upload and see where their case stands. I measure this work by what a customer must do and how far they must travel, not by the share of transactions that are digital. Some customers will always prefer a person at a counter, and our systems should make that person better informed rather than harder to find.