Rakuten Securities Hong Kong

Vision

Meeting the demands of an evolving market

‘Always Improve, Always Advance’ is one of the Five Principles for Success in Rakuten Shugi (Rakuten Basic Principles). Rakuten Securities Hong Kong is committed to reach their goals and maximize their customer’s satisfaction. In the competitive world of online forex trading, customer experience is everything. To ensure that traders choose their platform, RSHK wanted to find new and innovative ways to make their entire customer experience as seamless as possible.

With COVID-19 restricting the ability of prospective customers to get to a branch they decided to assess their current operations and transform the customer acquisition process.

Until then new customers had to make a physical appointment, or download an application from the website, and return it to them so that it could be reviewed before they could open an account. This process was both time-consuming for customers as well as requiring dedicated resources at RSHK.

‘In order to be competitive in this market we needed to ensure that we made the process of signing up as easy as possible for our clients,’ says Shinichi Sasaki, General Manager, Head of Corporate Division, Rakuten Securities Hong Kong Limited.

As a result of this strategy, they looked to create an online on-boarding application that would allow customers to open an account anywhere, anytime. This application needed to be able to integrate with their back-office applications including their enterprise CRM platform, document information verification and extraction, face verification, broker system application and deposit verification, creating an end-to-end digital customer journey while optimizing efficiency.

RSHK had already engaged us to help them assess the maturity level of their data loss protection (DLP) and data leakage prevention strategy. We’re also RSHK’s network partner supporting the business with agile, scalable and secure local network service. Building on the understanding of RSHK business they decided to partner with us to help transform the customer acquisition process.

Transformation

Innovating together to meet customer expectations

RSHK has a roadmap of cloud and DevOps to deliver the secure, highly available and scalable experience to their customer. After the assessment and leveraging the in-depth understanding of their business landscape and objectives, we proposed the cloud-native application architecture on Azure.

By moving their onboarding process to the cloud, they can ensure that their customers can open an account with the minimum of difficulty. RSHK and NTT worked closely together to optimize the user experience, ensuring that it delivered the seamless process that they were looking for.

The end-to-end managed solution leveraged our expertise, in cloud, applications and security to ensure all aspects of the solution, from architecture and design through to implementation, configuration and maintenance, work together to help RSHK achieve their business objectives.

The infrastructure powering the solution was designed to scale to meet any spikes in demand and RSHK have full visibility of the solution, giving them advance warning of increased usage.

The entire solution was created to be secure by design to ensure that they were able to meet their commitments to their customers, as well as all data protection regulations.

‘Working with NTT means that we have a partner who understands our entire business, and who looks for solutions to any challenges we face,’ says Tony Tsang, IT Manager, Rakuten Securities Hong Kong Limited.

This solution builds on our long-standing relationship with RSHK, where we also provide RSHK with agile, scalable and secure local network services to meet their evolving needs.

Results

Enabling an optimized user experience

With the new online onboarding application, RSHK’s customers can now enjoy a fast and responsive experience anywhere, anytime.

The solution is fully compliant with GDPR and the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) regulations, ensuring all customer data are well protected and secure.

As the demand for their services evolves, and there has been a huge surge in RSHK’s internet traffic since the launch of the on-boarding application, our scalable and secure local network’s bandwidth was scaled up. This ensures that all their customers are provided with the same level of service, and enjoy an exceptional, low-latency experience.

The on-boarding application is the first phase of this project and with it operating smoothly they can now focus on the other areas of their digital transformation including greater integration with their back-office applications.

The ongoing partnership enables RSHK to focus on optimizing their customer experience, leveraging our expertise to exploit the potential of omnichannel customer journey management applications, robotic process automation, and AI.

‘NTT’s depth of services means that they’re able to ensure that all parts of our environment are working together to help us achieve our goals,’ Tsang says.

In addition, RSHK can improve their DLP program, helping them to detect and prevent data breaches, exfiltration or unwanted destruction of sensitive customer data more effectively.