Renting the system, still owning the promise

I am executive officer and chief information officer of Ogiwatari Securities, a Takamatsu firm founded in 1921 that holds ¥1.12 trillion of customer assets across 186,000 active accounts. Our 27 branches serve Kagawa, Ehime, Tokushima, Kochi and Okayama, and the median account holder is sixty-eight. I lead 58 technology staff through four general managers, with about forty contractors and an annual budget of ¥2.6 billion. More than half of that budget pays for a shared back-office service that we use alongside 22 other securities firms. I report to the president and present system risk to our board; I am not a director.

I started in 1996 writing COBOL batch jobs for credit cooperatives at a Takamatsu computing centre. Card authorisation work in Matsuyama and seven years at an Osaka systems integrator showed me how financial systems fail, and how often a failure appears first at a counter rather than on a console. I came to Ogiwatari in 2013 to lead the move from our own mainframe onto the shared service, which went live over Golden Week in 2016. It removed most of our bespoke code, and it means our most important overnight processing now runs on someone else's machines.

This site describes three decisions taken inside that dependence. During a supplier batch failure, we accepted orders only from accounts whose positions we could still trust and held the rest until late morning. After the account takeovers that struck Japanese online brokerages in 2025, we made passkeys compulsory and moved thousands of customers to telephone ordering. Earlier, I asked the board to fund an inheritance case system before a customer app, and we missed the opening months of the new NISA as a result. Each choice cost somebody something, and I have tried to say who.

Current focus

I am renegotiating our shared-service contract, which runs to March 2028, so that the exit terms, the returned-data format and the 06:30 position file are each tested yearly rather than written once and assumed.

Conversations I welcome

I would consider one outside-director seat at a listed company in western Japan from April 2027, with about twenty-four days a year, subject to my president's consent and a review of the relationships set out on my readiness page.