Empowering Nomura Ways of Working with Microsoft

Advancing Collaborative Workstyles in Finance at the Enterprise Level

Nomura Group has made substantial efforts on digital transformation to improve productivity and restructure business processes. This included goals to adjust office and location strategies, allowing flexible workstyles and better business continuity.

Ryu Kamekura, Head of Group Infrastructure Services (GIS) JP, explained the perspective driving the approach being taken at Nomura Group. He says, “Most professionals and companies would traditionally expect for digital transformation to be exclusively handled by their IT Department. We believe that for effective change to really take hold as an institution, there must be buy-in and implementation at all levels of the company, amongst staff and larger business units across regions.”

An additional outlook considered important was the incorporation of the firm’s Values of Integrity, Teamwork and Entrepreneurial Leadership, and Three “S” of Skills, Speed and Spirit. These concepts unite over 26,585 employees — over 90 nationalities across 30+ countries and regions — currently employed in Nomura Group as of March 31, 2022.

Ian Dobson, Co-Head Workspace Services UK, says, “When we started reviewing platforms and deciding how to use those four years ago, we obviously did not expect the impact of Covid-19. Our conclusion that we sent to our Group CEO was that one of the core products should be Microsoft Teams.”

The net revenue for three business divisions, Retail, Wholesale, and Investment Management, was ¥1.179 trillion in FY2021/2022, so ensuring similar levels could be met and excelled upon was a major requirement.

Ian continued saying, “We have been on a very complex two-year journey to get to this point of fully deploying the product suite. This is one of the first platforms covering all business Divisions to work collaboratively between the organizations. There have been many challenges as a highly regulated company and the need to adhere to strict compliance.”

Nomura’s teams responsible for roll-out of workspace and infrastructure services have had to liaise and coordinate with a large range of stakeholders having widely different requirements that need to be combined into one product. Senior sponsorship internally has been essential in achieving this delivery to support changing the culture and the success of the company.

Alexander Murray, Co-Head Workspace Services JP, says, “Demand is just astoundingly strong for what we are deploying with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365. So now we are going to have to deliver. I think that is a good problem as these are products that people are excited about because they are solving real business issues.”

Combining a Hybrid Approach to Align Business Unit Requirements

The accelerated use of digital technologies is necessary to maintain competitiveness in the financial industry is well understood at Nomura Group. Effective use of digital technologies is seen driving operational efficiencies and client convenience while also creating new value. In the Investment Banking Division there is major interest in video and voice technologies, while at other internal corporate departments interest leans towards chat and collaboration tools.

Among the biggest challenges are not the technical aspects but regulatory requirements, especially related to remote jurisdiction, as every business unit has their own different guidelines for compliance. A positive development within the company was the increased cooperation between compliance, workspace and infrastructure teams to ensure governance is properly established.

Andre John, Workspace Engineering Head US, says, “This is one of the first projects where engineering teams are upfront gathering requirements for all roles, all departments and business units. We can make better collective decisions and it is allowing us to propose better solutions with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365.”

Amongst the many client and business unit requirements is recording solutions for real-time data and voice capture. This includes compliance and reliability benchmarks — sometimes recording each conversation multiple times — and the capabilities were seen to be the highest with Microsoft Teams.

Current data management combines a hybrid on-premise and cloud framework to balance between regulatory requirements and efficient processing. The workspace and infrastructure teams are adapting roll-outs to accommodate the best style per region, department or business unit and currently on-boarding close to 1,000 employees each week.

Ian says, “We are rolling out at different speeds for both regulatory and business reasons. There is a strong level of excitement from employees and business units to get access to key content and features from Microsoft.”

Building Best of Class Expertise while Maximizing Employee Creativity and Productivity

Nomura Group is approaching adoption globally and is leveraging their global partnership with Microsoft in Japan, UK and the United States. The ability to work together at the enterprise level is essential for handling the extent of these complex requirements.

The perception for security requirements is also evolving throughout the financial industry and government regulators. As long as the right security protocols are in place, there is an increased openness to processing company data on the cloud. 

Alex says, “Microsoft’s security features are well understood by regulators, even with some exceptions in certain countries or jurisdictions. I think our internal compliance and security teams, and also executive leadership, are pretty comfortable with what we have been able to achieve.”

Nomura is seeing digitalization and increased use of software across all client industries. The path of change the company has decided on aims to build best-in-class expertise, while also maximizing employee creativity and productivity, contributing to society, and enabling clients in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Murray Dunlop, Head of Programme Management UK, says, “We have been working very closely with Microsoft Consultancy Services. A key part of that is handling the challenges of compliance and integrations in a highly regulated environment. Microsoft has provided their expertise to our engineering teams and assistance with design and technical documentation.”

More than 40% of the company’s workforce is based outside of Japan and internal requests from business units were quite notable. While Microsoft Teams is the core product, staff are eager to see a larger number of advanced integrations.

While those are on the roadmap, the focus for the workspace and infrastructure teams remains on prioritizing the initial key functionality. One of those features in the initial minimal viable product was translation for messaging to handle multiple international languages, including English and Japanese.

A separate internal initiative, Digital IQ, is an e-learning program designed to raise the level of digital knowledge and develop specialized skills of staff at Nomura. This use of technology in new ways for improved productivity aligns with Nomura Ways of Working. The company is seeing better facilitation of knowledge transfer with the collaborative tools and spaces that are now available.

Andre commented on the increasing possibilities being taken advantage of, saying, “When people previously talked about collaborating, it was basically sharing a file, or sharing a picture of a file, maybe with redlining or highlighting. We are now seeing actual co-authoring and collaborations on shared files. So the capabilities with Microsoft services are definitely changing the way teams are interacting throughout the organization.”

Securing Institutional Knowledge through Technology and People

Nomura Group is approaching its 100th anniversary in 2025. Accompanying milestones have been established which further the company’s commitment to create growth opportunities and innovation through investment in technology and people. In-house training for the group’s 26,585 employees has recorded 259,921 cumulative total of hours in FY2021/22.

The value of institutional knowledge features prominently in the organization and was explained by Ryu saying, “The infrastructure we’ve developed for communications during Covid-19 has also facilitated our expansion of online and workshop training. This allows us to maximize the number of participants and training effects beyond distance and time constraints. We expect to continue these activities with the products and platforms from Microsoft.”

The company has created a system for advocates, Change Leads Network, which number in the mid-hundreds globally. These are people that are assisting with the cross-pollination of new ideas, processes and workstyles horizontally across business units and also vertically in terms of hierarchy and generations.

Alex says, “We have to establish real institutional knowledge in the group network, and our newly joined graduates, junior talent and senior executives all give us an added level of diversity we can leverage among multiple regions, geographies, languages and backgrounds.”

The company has made a transition from fixed desktop computing of the last twenty years to a greater emphasis on laptops. This has notably affected culture and workstyle over the last two years. Staff can now easily move with their laptops to collaboration-areas which is another favorable communications dynamic. The goal is not to only give people the physical spaces and hardware to work together, but also the tools to extend their work from home, international offices or while on international business.

Ian says, “Our Change Leads are key to driving awareness of features and functions of the suite from Microsoft. They are the first businesspeople to gain access to a product and can go out to someone's desk and ask if they have tried real-time translation, automation or new collaboration features.”

As this initial phase finishes, the workspace and infrastructure teams are looking to future phases to include the addition of other products, including Exchange Online, OneDrive and SharePoint from Microsoft. They are including in their outlook tools to leverage insights such as Microsoft Viva to mine corporate data and provide recommendations at both the individual and advisory level. Yammer has the potential for internal blogging, information sharing and collaboration in new ways in the company.

Nomura Group expects further adjustments and customization to balance requests from business units, the regulatory environment, and the additional institutional knowledge to be added along the way with the growing ecosystem from Microsoft 365.