A career spent where batch output meets the counter

My first employer kept its computer room on the third floor of an office block near Takamatsu port, and in April 1996 I joined it as a junior programmer. Akashiba Computing Centre ran overnight batch processing for credit cooperatives, agricultural cooperatives and two municipal payrolls. I wrote and maintained COBOL programs under a senior engineer who compared every change against the previous night's output totals. The most useful habit she gave me was to ask what a customer would see at nine o'clock if a job ran late. From 1998 I spent most of my time on year-2000 remediation, reading date logic written before I was born and testing it with the cooperatives' own clerks.

In October 2000 I moved to Matsuyama to join Kozuruma Card Services, a regional credit-card company owned by a group of Ehime retailers and transport companies. I worked on authorisation and merchant systems while shops replaced magnetic-stripe terminals with chip readers. A card authorisation either answers within seconds or the customer leaves the till embarrassed. I learnt to design for the moment the network was unavailable: what the terminal should do, which limit applied, and who would carry the loss if an offline approval was later declined. Those questions were commercial as much as technical, and I learnt to put them to the business before choosing an answer myself.

Yodomaru Information Services recruited me to Osaka in April 2006. It built and converted systems for regional securities firms, shinkin banks and leasing companies. I became a project manager in 2009 and led two conversions in which securities firms moved from their own back-office systems to packaged or shared services. Both went live. One went live with a month of manual reconciliations that the client had not budgeted for, because we had tested the supplier's processing far more thoroughly than the client's own end-of-day routines. I still think about the branch staff who stayed late matching figures by hand.

Ogiwatari asked me to return to Shikoku in July 2013 to lead the same kind of move. The firm's mainframe back office was reliable and expensive, and its maintenance contract ended in 2016. The real work was deciding which of 214 bespoke reports and processes we would give up. We kept 61. Branch managers lost printed lists they had relied on for twenty years, and before replacing any of them I asked which decisions each list informed. The cutover took place over Golden Week in May 2016, with a rehearsed rollback that we did not need.

I became general manager of IT planning in April 2017 and chief information officer in April 2021. In between, I managed the service-level schedule with Kuranoe Information Systems, put tablets in the hands of our 560 sales staff, and helped the firm through the months of 2020 when older customers would not visit branches. When the board decided in 2021 to reduce our network from 34 branches to 27, my task was to make sure that a customer in a closed branch's town could still reach an adviser, read a statement and sign a form without an hour's journey.

As CIO I lead 58 staff through four general managers covering infrastructure and security, applications and supplier management, branch and channel systems, and IT planning. I report to our president, Shunsuke Ogiwatari, and present system risk and incident reports to the board of directors each quarter. After any significant incident I also report to our audit and supervisory board members. I sit on the user council of Kuranoe's shared service and have chaired its incident working group since April 2025. None of these roles makes me a director, and I am careful not to describe them as though they did.

Three decisions define my present work. During a Kuranoe batch failure in November 2024, I recommended accepting orders only from accounts whose positions had not changed the previous day. In 2025 we made passkeys compulsory for online trading, accepting that some customers would leave the online channel. In 2022 I argued that an inheritance case system should come before a customer app, which delayed the app until March 2025. Each decision was approved by the president or the board, and each left a cost I can name.

I am now interested in serving on another company's board. Japanese boards increasingly ask whether their outside directors understand system risk, and I can help there, though I have a great deal to learn about capital, remuneration and succession from the other side of the table. I would want to begin as a member of an audit and supervisory committee under an experienced chair.

Open to Board appointments

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