Head Asset Management Solutions
Normura Research Institute
[PNR]
The March 11, 2011, earthquake shook Japan’s financial industry — not just in the literal sense. Firms awakened to the need for, and are demanding, “more stable and durable system operations to prepare for future disasters,” observes Shin Kusunoki of Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo. He knows because NRI’s 2,300-person financial technology department (out of 6,600 global employees) is a dominant service provider. Its data center handles 50 percent of the trading of Japanese equities and government bonds and 70 percent of mutual funds. Its customers want to ensure resiliency by relying on multiple processing sites and taking advantage of cloud computing. NRI has invested significantly in cloud solutions across all sectors but sees them as particularly suited to the security and flexibility that financial companies require, says Kusunoki, 52. For NRI, a systems and consulting firm that was modeled in the 1960s on U.S. think tank Stanford Research Institute, Kusunoki heads two divisions: financial and asset management solutions, and financial technology solutions.
